We visited Mogosoaia this weekend, too.
Mogosoia is a former royal palace that has seen a bit more history than is really good for it. It was built in the late 1600s by a fellow named Constantine Brancoveanu, who was the ruler of Wallachia. (Wallachia is now southern Romania.) Brancoveanu was an enlightened fellow with a taste for modern architecture, so his palace was an interesting mix of traditional Byzantine construction (lots of Roman arches) and elements imported from elsewhere (like a Venetian loggia, Baroque decoration, and some very fancy Austrian-style brickwork).
Alas, Brancoveanu conspired against his overlord, the Ottoman Sultan. The Sultan didn't take it well, and had Brancoveanu taken to Istanbul, tortured, and beheaded. (His wife recovered his head and brought it back, and Brancoveanu eventually became a national hero and martyr, but never mind that now.) The Sultan had Mogosoia turned into a "han" -- a sort of Motel-6 for caravans -- and for the next century or so, that's what it was.
By the mid-1800s it was pretty run down. But by that time Romania was independent of the Ottomans, and an aristocratic family bought the crumbling old palace and renovated it.
It stayed in the family for nearly a century, eventually passing to a Princess Martha Bibescu. Princess Martha was a remarkable woman. Born in 1887, she corresponded with Marcel Proust as a girl, was friends with the Romanian and Russian royal families, smoked cigarettes in a jade holder, kept a Parisian salon full of Dadaists, wrote advanced and decadent novels (under her own name) and pot-boiler thrillers (under a pen name), was vaguely involved with some sort of espionage in Berlin in the 1930s, and lived to be 85, dying a very old woman in her beloved Paris.
By that time Mogosoaia had been taken over by the Communists, who turned it into a museum. Princess Martha had renovated the palace again, planted a long alley of poplars along the front drive, and also added a variety of Jazz Age innovations -- fancy mosaics on the floors, an elaborate rose garden. These were allowed to stay, but the Art Deco furniture mysteriously disappeared and has not been seen since.
Today Mogosoaia sits on the edge of a rather gummy little lake, surrounded by a park that has seen better days. On the other side of the lake, several large new houses are under construction; they'll do nothing for the view /from/ the old palace, but the people who live there will have a very nice view /of/ it.
But the palace itself is well worth a visit. Claudia and I enjoyed walking around the grounds and climbing up the long staircases to the various verandas and balconies. Alan enjoyed... the gravel. Gravel walks; lots of little pebbles. Pebbles are very interesting. They come in many different shapes. True, they're not good to eat... but you can throw them! When I undressed him for his bath that night, I found a dozen or more inside his clothes.
Anyhow. If you're in the neighborhood of Bucharest, Mogosoaia is well worth a look, especially if you're a history or architecture buff. One day Claudia will show me how to implant links in this thing; meanwhile, you can find lots of pictures by plugging "mogosoaia" into google. Most of the pages are in Romanian, mind you, which suggests that this site isn't too well known outside of this country.
(It's pronounced Mogo Sho Ai-yah, by the way. I'm guessing that's Turkish, though who knows.)
Posted by douglas at September 23, 2003 10:53 PM