THE UNIVERSE PALACE AT DUSK

COSMIC ROMANIA 6

-text and photos by Andrei Dorian Gheorghe;
design by Florin Stancu-

One day I walked on the most beautiful street of Bucharest,
the Victory Way,
and right near the National Military Circle,
something incomprehensible and irresistible called me…

… to a narrow and secondary street,
which ends with the Universe Palace.

This palace was built in between 1924 and 1930
to be the headquarters of the most important and popular Romanian journal,
“The Universe”
(including also its typography),
at the initiative of its patron and director with an astral name,
Stelian Popescu (stella = star in Latin).

It was made in a neo-Romanian style
by architects Paul Smarandescu and Emil Prager.

After World War II
this palace was confiscated by the communist regime,
Stelian Popescu being forced to emigrate to the west,
to not be imprisoned because he was the prototype
of a free journalistic spirit.

And today, unfortunately,
the future of this building is uncertain.

Certainly, many would be intrigued:

Why this pretentious name,
“The Universe”,
for a simple journal,
which had been founded in 1884 by an Italian-Romanian journalist,
Luigi Cazzavillan?

The answer:
just because its pages were opened for all that existed
in the universe of the people,
which is part of the infinite universe..

OK, but was that enough?

I didn’t try to find an answer,
the unexpected show of a beautiful dusk
was much more seductive.

It was like an answer of the Universe:

“Every molecule,
even the most insignificant,
represents me!”

So finally I wrote:

The Universe is in all,
You can meet it not only in the starry sky,
But also in a word, a palace, a bird, a dusk,
And in everything that makes you fly.