The markets of Bucharest

Before Amzei there was the Market on Neculescu's ground, by the Mogoșoaia Causeway: it ran from 1831 to 1841, when Amzei Market was founded in its place, on Iancu Ghica's ground. The parish took its name from the Amzei church — built by former colonel Nicolae Dărăscu but named for its second founder, Amza Năescu, his relative and testamentary executor, who contributed decisively to raising the church (1808–1810), sacrificing his entire fortune to it.

The Amzei Market halls were finished in 1872, together with the Central Halls — the town's first iron-and-brick generation. The market works today on the same spot, between Calea Victoriei and Piața Romană.

At the Berzei–Popa Tatu crossing there was, at least since the first half of the 19th century, a maidan — unbuilt public ground for commerce, with many wells and an islet-property then owned by Marin Măcelaru (the Borroczyn plan, 1846–1852). The site's market name — Matache Măcelaru — comes from a butcher too; whether it is the same man, our sources do not say.

The council built Matache Hall from a type design, in two stages: the southern end in 1886, the rest in 1898, through contractor Ion Nicolau — the contract says “extension to the Grivița hall”, as it was also called. The engine was the North Station (then Târgoviște Station): the station's urbanisation ripened the site. In 1940 the general mayor ordered the hall rebuilt — extended towards Berzei, partly raised a floor, a west canopy — and the hall held into the 21st century.

The end is recent and documented: expropriated and evacuated in February 2011, defended by protests in 2012, Matache Hall — historic monument LMI B-II-m-B-18181 — was demolished in 2013, for the new Uranus Boulevard. Today's market carries its name on the same site.

Neither Matache nor Traian market is on the Borroczyn plan: they were founded in the second half of the 19th century, starting as mere shacks. The Traian hall — iron and brick — was finished in 1896, per Giurescu (Gligor puts the works between 1896 and 1914; the difference stays on the page, unarbitrated).

“A temple of food”, as Dan-Silviu Boerescu calls it — with its Calea Călărașilor counterpart precisely in Traian Hall — the hall works today, with its painted-iron interior and stalls under the skylight: you can see it on a market morning.

The Great Market was the town's commercial belly — later under the double name of Ghica Market (meat, fish, poultry), left of the Dâmbovița, and Bibescu Market (vegetables and fruit), right of it, per Giurescu. And there the Central Halls were walled: the meat halls, finished after lawsuit, arbitration and successive delays (contractor: Alexis Godillot) in October 1872, on the model of the Paris Halles. Then came the fruit hall (1883), the fish hall (1888), the poultry hall (1899) and the artificial-ice factory (1903).

Across the Dâmbovița, at the foot of the Metropolitan Hill, lay the Bibescu-Vodă greengrocery — modernised in 1906, demolished under Carol II together with the small Unirii halls. The Great Hall stood alone until the summer of 1986, when systematisation swept it too. Today's Piața Unirii is on its site — and Halelor street keeps its name a few steps away.

The text, as Giurescu keeps it, is plain: the town reserves “six great markets” inside — for meat, greens, fruit, fish, maize — and four markets of 12,000 square stânjeni each “at the heads of the great causeways, where the villagers' carts may come”. Stan (BMIM VII, 1969) gives the list of heads: Mogoșoaiei, the Outer Fair's, Șerban Vodă and Caliței. With one reservation from Giurescu: the ten markets “were not all founded”.

The 20th century filled the map with new markets: after 1918 came Filantropia, Domeniilor, Chibrit, Dorobanți and Ghencea — Dorobanți, the interwar quarter's market, is the only one of this wave to enter our map with papers. Floreasca appears with no birth year — on the map it stays lit at every year: we found no founding year in trusted sources, so we invent none.