Qualla: Cantacuzino Palace https://qualla.com/cantacuzino-palace en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:31 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/s/x/f/s/cantacuzino-palace-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Cantacuzino Palace https://qualla.com/cantacuzino-palace Cantacuzino Palace: Introduction https://qualla.com/cantacuzino-palace/ Photo credit Neoclassicism Enthusiast, Public domain. The man who built it was nicknamed The Nabob, after a colonial-era word for someone fabulously, suspiciously rich. Gheorghe Grigore Cantacuzino had been mayor of Bucharest, then prime minister of Romania twice over, and his fortune was old, large, and sharpened by political access. In 1901 he hired the architect Ion D. Berindey to build him a palace on the Calea Victoriei - the boulevard locals were already calling Bucharest's Champs-Elysees - in the most fashionable French Beaux Arts manner. Two stone lions in the Louis XIV style flanked the entrance. The building was finished in 1902. It is, by some margin, the most theatrical of Bucharest's belle epoque mansions still standing.

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Image: Neoclassicism Enthusiast | Public domain

]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/x/f/s/cantacuzino-palace-wp/sxfs-cantacuzino-palace-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Cantacuzino Palace: The Nabob's Address https://qualla.com/cantacuzino-palace/ Photo credit Neoclassicism Enthusiast, CC BY-SA 4.0. Calea Victoriei runs north from the river through the heart of central Bucharest, lined with banks, ministries, and the mansions of the late nineteenth-century Romanian elite. Number 141 was Cantacuzino's stretch of it. Berindey designed a palace that addressed the avenue head-on...

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/x/f/s/cantacuzino-palace-wp/sxfs-cantacuzino-palace-the-nabobs-address.mp3 0:06 2 full Cantacuzino Palace: The Treaty Signed Inside https://qualla.com/cantacuzino-palace/ Photo credit Houli, CC BY-SA 3.0 ro. On 10 August 1913, in one of the palace's reception rooms, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece signed the Treaty of Bucharest that ended the Second Balkan War. It was an awkward, fragile peace - the treaty redrew Balkan borders that the First World War would scrambl...

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/x/f/s/cantacuzino-palace-wp/sxfs-cantacuzino-palace-the-treaty-signed-inside.mp3 0:06 3 full Cantacuzino Palace: The Composer's Wife, Then the Composer https://qualla.com/cantacuzino-palace/ Photo credit Neoclassicism Enthusiast, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cantacuzino died in 1913. The palace passed to his son Mihail, who died prematurely in 1929. Mihail's widow Maria - known to friends as Maruca - was an elegant, restless woman with literary friends and her own romantic complications. In December 1939, she married George Enescu - ...

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/x/f/s/cantacuzino-palace-wp/sxfs-cantacuzino-palace-the-composers-wife-then-the-composer.mp3 0:06 4 full Cantacuzino Palace: What the Walls Hold https://qualla.com/cantacuzino-palace/ Photo credit Neoclassicism Enthusiast, CC BY-SA 4.0. Of the original suite of rooms only about five are open to visitors today; the rest of the palace is occupied by various cultural institutions. But the five public rooms are enough. Vermont's medallions still hang above the doors, including Shepherd with Sheep and Peasant Woman w...

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/x/f/s/cantacuzino-palace-wp/sxfs-cantacuzino-palace-what-the-walls-hold.mp3 0:06 5 full Cantacuzino Palace: The Avenue, Still Walking https://qualla.com/cantacuzino-palace/ Photo credit Neoclassicism Enthusiast, CC BY-SA 4.0. Calea Victoriei survived Ceausescu's bulldozers more or less intact, partly because it ran north of the great demolition zone he opened up to build the Centrul Civic and the Palace of the Parliament. The Cantacuzino Palace, with its lions and its glass canopy and its Beaux Arts s...

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/x/f/s/cantacuzino-palace-wp/sxfs-cantacuzino-palace-the-avenue-still-walking.mp3 0:06 6 full