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.

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Pârâianu on Popescu, 'Proiectul feroviar românesc (1842-1916)'. H-Romania. 03-18-2015.
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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

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Pârâianu on Popescu, 'Proiectul feroviar românesc (1842-1916)'. H-Romania. 03-18-2015.
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rather missing from the present-day landscape in that region.

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
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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.

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.