Qualla: Bucur Church

Bucur Church: Introduction

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stefan Jurca from Munich, Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0. Every great city has a founding story it half-believes. Romulus and the wolf. Cadmus and the dragon's teeth. In Bucharest, the founder is a shepherd. His name was Bucur - the Romanian word stem means joy - and according to legend he pastured his sheep on the banks of the Dambovita River, built a small church on a low hill, and gave the place that grew up around him its name. Historians have argued for two centuries about whether Bucur was real. The small white church bearing his name on Radu Voda Street is part of the argument. The legend is on one side. The bricks are on the other. Both have advocates.

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Image: Stefan Jurca from Munich, Germany | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bucur Church: The Quiet Building

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrei Stroe, CC BY-SA 3.0 ro. Bucur Church is small, white, and almost rural in feel. Its walls are plain. The entrance opens through a wooden porch - the kind you see on traditional Romanian peasant houses, supported on carved wooden posts. Above sits a single cupola with a roof shaped, locals say, like a mu...

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Image: Andrei Stroe | CC BY-SA 3.0 ro

Bucur Church: What the Legend Says

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexandru Pănoiu, CC BY-SA 2.0. The story first surfaces in print in 1820, in a book on the Danubian Principalities by the British consul William Wilkinson, published in London. A geography textbook by Iosif Genilie repeated it in 1835. By the late nineteenth century, the legend was thick on the ground in Bucha...

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Image: Alexandru Pănoiu | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bucur Church: The Historians' Quarrel

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Munteanu Anca, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1891, the Bucharest historian Dimitrie Papazoglu collected the early texts that asserted Bucur as the church's founder, but Papazoglu himself doubted the legend. He proposed instead that the church was built in 1568 by Alexandru II Mircea, a Wallachian voivode, in the cemetery...

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Image: Munteanu Anca | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bucur Church: What the Hill Holds

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit IonIonescu, CC BY 2.5. In the eighteenth century, the city engineers cut a street through the hill that the church sits on, dividing it in two. On the higher half stood the Radu Voda Monastery, founded in the late sixteenth century, which the small church served as a chapel. On the lower half, exposed ...

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Image: IonIonescu | CC BY 2.5

Bucur Church: City of Joy, Still

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrei Stroe, CC BY-SA 3.0 ro. Bucharest grew, and grew again, and twice in the twentieth century lost much of itself to fire, earthquake, and Ceausescu's bulldozers. Through all of it, the small white church on Radu Voda survived. It survived being incorporated into a monastery and then orphaned from one. It ...

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Image: Andrei Stroe | CC BY-SA 3.0 ro