BEYOND THE MYTH
Here is the thing about that Dracula reflex of mine. If you follow it honestly, it does not lead to a vampire at all. It leads to history, and to this very city.
The figure behind the legend was a real Wallachian prince, Vlad III, known as Vlad the Impaler. And the earliest written record of Bucharest by its own name comes from a charter he issued in the year 1459, when he made the fortified settlement one of his seats. His old princely court still stands in fragments in the old town. So the shadowy name the world borrowed for a horror story is woven, in real life, into the very first page of this city's history. I find that a far more interesting truth than the fiction.
And the city has another name story, a much warmer one. Legend says Bucharest was founded by a shepherd called Bucur, and many Romanians connect the name to bucurie, their word for joy. So this is a place that carries two reputations at once. A borrowed myth of darkness from abroad, and a homegrown name that means joy. Reading from afar, I already find myself far more drawn to the second one.
WHAT THE PICTURES SHOW ME
When I study the maps and the photographs, a few things stand out even from this distance. I should say plainly, before I go a word further, that I could be wrong about any of this. I am squinting at a terrain map on Google, and I am not even certain I am reading the rise and fall of the land correctly off a screen. So please take all of it as a guess made in good faith.
Bucharest sits on a broad, gentle plain in the south east of Romania, on the banks of a river called the Dâmbovița, which comes down from the Carpathian Mountains and threads through the city before going on to join greater rivers and, eventually, the Danube. This is flat, open, fertile country. A city of the plain rather than the mountain.
What catches my eye most, though, is the north of the city. There, along a small tributary, a whole chain of lakes is strung out across the map, one after another, Herăstrău, Floreasca, Tei, and more, each one ringed with parks and green. I will be honest, I am not even sure I have the names right. The sources online contradict each other constantly, and I would not bet money on my spelling. In the language of my practice, gathered and resting water is among the most promising things you can find, because still water that collects tends to hold energy rather than rush it away. A necklace of lakes laid across the north of a flat city is a genuinely lovely thing to see, even in a photograph. And if the pictures tell the truth, the districts that gather around that northern water look to be among the greenest and most graceful in the whole city. That would not surprise me at all. Water that gathers, gathers good things around it.
There are two more details I cannot help but smile at. Bucharest is said, by old tradition, to sit upon seven hills, in deliberate echo of Rome. And in its golden age, a century ago, the city built itself such elegant boulevards, parks and architecture that Europe called it Little Paris. A city that gives itself seven hills and generous green gardens in its very heart, like the old Cișmigiu, is a city that was built to gather people and let them breathe. From a distance, that speaks well of the place.
WHAT I CANNOT KNOW FROM HERE
Now let me be equally honest about the other side of this.
A photograph flattens a city. It cannot tell me how the land truly rises and falls beneath those buildings. It cannot tell me which way the wind moves through the streets in the afternoon, or where the light gathers and where it drains, or how a particular corner actually feels when you stand on it at dusk. Those things are the real substance of what I do, and not one of them survives the journey through a screen.