Vitanthe story of a neighbourhood on the edge of Bucharest

Vitan in Nicolae Ionescu’s photographs #

Vitan is a neighbourhood of Sector 3, one of Bucharest’s six districts, stretched along the Dâmbovița river south-east of the centre. Calea Vitan, Vitan Road, runs through it end to end.

Nicolae Ionescu’s photographs, now held by the National Village Museum, show it between 1928 and 1934: dirt streets, plank fences, low houses, snow in the lanes. A mahala, as Romanians called such old quarters on the edge of town. At Christmas the children go round with the star, a carol custom. At Easter, on a patch of waste ground, the “dulap” turns: a wooden wheel with swings, two to a seat.

The monastery next to Vitan #

To the south, Vitan bordered Văcărești Monastery. Nicholas Mavrocordatos, the first Phanariot (Istanbul Greek) prince of Wallachia, began it in 1716; his son Constantine finished the work by 1739.

Mavrocordatos had also ruled Moldavia, and the arms over the church portal join Moldavia’s aurochs head with Wallachia’s eagle. From 1865 the monastery was a prison, until it was cleared in 1973. Ceaușescu’s regime demolished the great church in December 1986, as it did other churches in the city. The carved stones that were saved are in museums, and another mall, Sun Plaza, was later built on the monastery’s site.

The whole story of the monastery, on one map →

The Dâmbovița before the canal #

Amedeo Preziosi painted the Dâmbovița in 1868 at Radu Vodă, upstream of Vitan: a river with earth banks, houses on stilts and churches on the hills. His works went into the collection of King Carol I.

It was straightened into a canal in 1880–1883, then enclosed in the double concrete channel of 1985–1988 that Vitan looks out on today.

The Dâmbovița’s meanders, over today’s streets →

The road to the monastery #

West of Vitan, Calea Văcărești ran from the centre to the monastery. Alexandru Phoebus painted it and the mahalas around it between 1934 and 1952: hand-lettered shop signs, one-storey houses, waste ground with a factory chimney on the horizon.

Many of Bucharest’s Jews lived on Calea Văcărești and Calea Dudești. In the Bucharest pogrom, during the Iron Guard rebellion of 21–24 January 1941, Iron Guard members, together with police, prefecture staff and many civilians, wrecked Jewish homes and shops along several kilometres of these two streets, and 125 Jews were killed in the pogrom, according to the Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania.

The German photographer Willy Pragher photographed looted shops on Calea Văcărești at the time. The Baden-Württemberg archive records date the photographs to 21–24 January 1941.

Why some sources count two finished circuses and others six #

The Romanian Wikipedia article on the hunger circus said from its first version, in June 2006, that only two circuses were finished when Ceaușescu fell.

That first version was translated from the English article. On 2 May 2022, an anonymous IP and one account added a list of the eleven complexes in several edits; a later edit the same day changed “only two” to “only 6”, with no source. The same split, five finished besides Unirii (Delfinului, Titan, Cotroceni, Băneasa, Floreasca), appears on a blog from November 2009, also without a source.

The blog and the Wikipedia list count among the finished ones four complexes without domes, which the only other source consulted, an article on bucuresti.ro, says were unfinished in 1989. Jurnalul Național wrote in January 2005 that only two had been “partly put into service”, at Pantelimon and Unirea, and in 2009 that “by ’89 only two were built”. A Radio Free Europe retrospective of 11 October 1989 shows Ceaușescu visiting “the commercial complexes at Unirea and Delfinului”. The map shows those two as finished and the other four as “unclear whether finished”.

On the Vitan shell, a mall #

After 1989, work stopped. “By 1990 most of them had only their load-bearing structures finished, and for eight years the work stayed at that stage,” the magazine Capital wrote on 9 September 1999, the day before the Vitan mall opened, “built on the load-bearing structure of the old halls”.

The Turkish firms Bayındır and Fiba invested $40 million, according to Capital (Ziarul Financiar gave $35–45 million). Of 47,500 square metres built, 26,500 were for rent. Under the dome, a fountain sent water 25 metres up every six minutes. Fiba bought the Vitan shell together with the one at Lujerului for $6 million, Ziarul Financiar reported.

The mall now calls itself “the first modern shopping mall in Romania, opened in September 1999”. An article on bucuresti.ro likewise calls it “the first of its kind in Romania”.

The marsh in the lake basin #

Next to the site of the demolished monastery, a basin was dug in the late 1980s for the Văcărești reservoir, abandoned after 1989. The lake was never made. Reeds and willows grew in the basin and pools formed, and in May 2016 the government declared it Văcărești Natural Park, 186 hectares.

Which birds you hear in the Văcărești wetland, month by month →