Proiectul Feroviar Românesc (1842-1916)'

H-Romania Pârâianu on Popescu, 'Proiectul feroviar românesc (1842-1916)'

Review published on Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Toader Popescu. Proiectul feroviar românesc (1842-1916). Bucharest: Simetria, 2014. Illustrations. 294 pp. n.p. (paper), ISBN 978-973-1872-34-6.

Reviewed by Răzvan Pârâianu (Targu Mures University, Department of History and International Relations) Published on H-Romania (March, 2015) Commissioned by R. Chris Davis

Last Stop, Modernity: The Romanian Railway Project

Nowadays, when the Romanian railway system is in decay due endemic mismanagement, rampant corruption, and a chronic lack of resources, accounts of the truly pioneering epoch of the railway system and its visionaries may come as a surprise. Yet, from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, Romania’s railway stations were perceived as veritable temples of modernity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Literatură și artă română (Romanian literature and art), one of the most respectable cultural reviews, published a photo series of the Romanian railways, including its stations and bridges.[1] Nothing epitomized the progress of those years more than these robust and modern structures. A new nation had been born, and these were the signs of its promising future. In Mihail Sebastian’s 1944 play Steaua fără nume (The star without a name), Ms. Cucu, the local schoolmistress in a provincial town, every day corrals the young girls gathered at the station to witness the express train passing through their little town. The wonderment stirred by images of the railway reveals a fascination with the luxury and glamour of another world, of an intangible realm of progress and wealth. Like the cinema, the railway offered an escape both figuratively and literally from an older and more stable order, and marked a conspicuous way forward to an exciting new but unknowable one.

In Romania today, the story is quite different. The semantic is different. Modernity is no longer fascinating but threatening and frightening. To many, it endangers the identity of a nation no longer perceived as young and dynamic but “multi-millennial” and unaltered.[2] Consequently, the greater part of Romanian historiography over the last half century or so has ignored the concrete aspects of modernity, such as the railway system, focusing instead on the various forms of reaction against modernity. Historians and other scholars have neglected what was, or what might have been, the material substance of modernity, finding it more relevant or rewarding to examine modernity’s imperfect forms and the myriad of critics they have triggered. For example, the two-volume Modernizare – Europenism: România de la Cuza Vodă la Carol al II-lea(Modernization – Europeanism: Romania from Prince Cuza to Carol II) (1995/1996), a major work edited by Luminiţa Iacob and Gheorghe Iacob, contains only a brief mention of Romania’s transportation system, paying greater attention to how Romanian tradition was intertwined with modernity. Yet the railway system, perhaps the most visible and potent symbol of Romania’s entry into modernity, had nothing to do with tradition. It was pure modernity. Stations, bridges, tracks, and other railway structures were all brand new in the second part of the nineteenth century.

Toader Popescu’s Proiectul feroviar românesc (1842–1916) (The Romanian railway project) is therefore a welcome and worthwhile reassessment of Romania’s foray into modernity. The impressively researched and richly illustrated book offers a historical interpretation about the nation- space and the way in which the process of modernization conquered a geographically, politically, and culturally heterogeneous territory. The railway not only marked the advance of the technical world into Romania’s backward universe but also signified a profound change in the everyday way of life, creating new horizons and fostering new attitudes about the future. Up to now, this change has been poorly documented. As Ana Maria Zahariade remarks in her foreword, this “technical miracle” has not even piqued the interest of historians of architecture (p. 8). Yet Popescu, an architect and a lecturer in urbanism and architectural history at the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest, offers much more than a history of Romanian architecture. Proiectul feroviar românesc reveals an important landmark of Romanian modernity, one that has been neglected by a mainstream of Romanian historians still too conservative to seek out new objects of research. It is not surprising, then, that fresh historical interpretations and themes are surfacing far away from the disciplinary shores of professional history.

Proiectul feroviar românesc does justice both to the history of the first decades of railway development in the Romanian Old Kingdom and to Romania's struggle for synchronization with the civilized world. Popescu takes into account not only the practical details of this development but also the discourse about Romania’s modernization process, both internally and in the broader European context. This book is also a valuable contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of Romanian modernity, analyzing how different agendas of development competed over quite limited public resources.

Popescu organizes the book according to three, increasingly smaller, scales of observation to analyze what he refers to as the spatial aspects of the Romanian railway system: “Territory,” “City,” and “Station.” Part 1, “Territory,” describes the early stage of the railway system’s development, which consisted of only a few plans and projects. At this time, the Romanian government attempted to lease some of its lines to various foreign companies, according to the importance ascribed to the respective lines. It was a moment of imagining the future, progress, and welfare.

Part 2, “City,” explores how a prominent place within Romanian cities was created for the railway station. This set off tremendously important discussions about the role of the station and its place within the country’s future urban development. In addition, the placement and building of stations posed numerous problems, including property disputes and the empowerment of authorities to manage these issues. In the late nineteenth century, Romanian cities were developing around emergent industries, such as oil, heavy industry, large-scale agriculture, munitions, and textiles. A newly industrious society was ready to be born and to shape its living habitat according to its new imperatives. Factories were the seeds for the future. For the many who benefited from industrialization and urbanization, these new cities represented living utopias of progress, prosperity, and wealth. In 1885, Colonel Eugeniu Alcaz built in the town of Buhuși, in the province of Moldavia, the largest cloth factory in Southeastern Europe at the time.[3] Around the factory a new city grew, one whose growth was marked and accelerated by a newly built railway station, of course. Buhuşi was one of five railway stations, together with ones in Gârleni, Podoleni, Rosnov, and Piatra Neamț, on the line between Bacău and Piatra Neamț, inaugurated in 1885. While this was nothing more than a very small, regional line, it was nevertheless a definitive sign of progress and modernity, one that is

Part 3, “Station,” examines the architectural history of these stations. According to Popescu, the station was the mirror of modernity, “the hitch between the technical and industrial world and urban life,” and moreover “the most visible and striking act of the process of modernization” (p. 236). In the 1870s, foreign concessionaires built Romania’s first railway stations, whose architectural style was similar if not identical to other stations in Western Europe. The Romanian government began building its own stations after 1880, when the Ministry of Commerce and Public Works took over and expanded the railway system. These new stations were, for the most part, imitations of earlier ones. After 1885, however, a period of original and vivid architecture emerged, one that can aptly be called a “C.F.R. style,” that is, the style of the official Romanian Railways (Căile Ferate Române). Representative of this style are the stations in Vaslui, Târgoviște, Mărășești, and Călărași, which are beautifully illustrated throughout this part of the book. After the Great Royal Jubilee Exhibition of 1906, designers began searching for a more national kind of architectural style. Following the design trends of new buildings in Romanian towns and cities at this time, new railway stations were built in neo-Romantic, neo-Gothic, or neo-Byzantine styles. The design of many smaller and more rural stations drew from elements in the local surroundings. Some stations were built using local raw materials, such as stone and wood, and thus integrated with the various regional styles.

The story of the Romanian railway system is also the story of Romanian culture’s adaptation to and integration within the modern European world. Across the country, remnants of this story are still visible as relics of a period when modernity had substance as well as imported forms, contradicting Titu Maiorescu’s dictum. The aforementioned factory in Buhuși, once a powerful engine of economic growth and development in the region, and long the heart that drove the pulse of the city, has been closed since 2006. The identity and vigor of the city has, like so many deindustrialized urban spaces across Romania and Eastern Europe, diminished as a result. Today in Bucharest an inquiring traveler might come upon the old Filaret railway station, which served as the terminus of the Bucharest–Giurgiu line. Both the station and the line were inaugurated in 1869 as Romania’s first. The approximately 65 km north–south line connected Bucharest, the new capital of the Romanian United Principalities, to the Danube and the border with Bulgaria. In 1960, Progresul (“the progress”) railway station, close to the new margin of Bucharest, replaced Filaret as the line’s new terminus. Filaret was closed down and then transformed into a bus station. In 2005, the old Bucharest–Giurgiu line was suspended after a truss bridge collapsed over the Argeș River at the town of Grădiştea, and Progresul was abandoned. Once the embodiment of progress and modernization in the late nineteenth century, Filaret station is today nearly deserted. It functions as a depot for bus companies serving routes to Bulgaria and Greece. While nowadays it is not hard to imagine the grandeur of the building when it was inaugurated nearly 150 years ago, it is hard to grasp the enthusiasm and trust of those people in a new era of modernity and prosperity. The story of this line and its stations are presented, among others, in this beautiful book. It can be seen not only as a history of Romanian modernity but also a tribute to the people who built this modernity.

Notes

[1]. Literatură și artă română 14 (1910): 73–76, 82–83, 98, 105, 107–108, 131, 134, 136.

[2]. The Romanian term multimilenar (muti-millennial) is a catchword inherited from Communist

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Pârâianu on Popescu, 'Proiectul feroviar românesc (1842-1916)'. H-Romania. 03-18-2015. https://networks.h-net.org/node/7941/reviews/64818/p%C3%A2r%C3%A2ianu-popescu-proiectul-feroviar-rom%C3%A2nesc-1842-1916 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-Romania historiography and cultural propaganda under the protochronist current. See Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceauşescu’s Romania (Berkley: University of California Press, 1991), 312.

[3]. Alcaz was a military officer and trusted advisor to Michalache Sturdza and then Grigore Alexandru Ghika, the Romanian princes of Moldavia prior to its unification with Wallachia. Beginning in 1860, in his capacity as finance minister of the Romanian United Principalities, Alcaz prioritized the development of a national industry. From 1865 he dedicated his efforts to his cloth factory in Buhuși. He became one of the most important industrialists of Romania in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

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Citation: Răzvan Pârâianu. Review of Popescu, Toader, Proiectul feroviar românesc (1842-1916). H- Romania, H-Net Reviews. March, 2015. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=43410

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.