Qualla: National Bank of Romania https://qualla.com/national-bank-of-romania 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/national-bank-of-romania-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: National Bank of Romania https://qualla.com/national-bank-of-romania National Bank of Romania: Introduction https://qualla.com/national-bank-of-romania/ Photo credit DimiTalen, CC0. Romania is still owed its gold. In 1916, with the German army advancing, the National Bank of Romania loaded its reserves onto trains and sent them east to Moscow for safekeeping. The Russian government accepted the deposit, signed the receipts, and locked the gold in vaults of the Kremlin. A year later the Tsar fell, and the new Bolshevik regime quietly decided that the deposit was no longer a deposit. More than a century later, with one minor exception, none of the gold has been returned. The headquarters that sent it sits on Lipscani Street in old Bucharest, two adjoining palaces of granite and Corinthian columns, still doing the work of a central bank under different masters.

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/x/f/s/national-bank-of-romania-wp/sxfs-national-bank-of-romania-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full National Bank of Romania: Founding the Lei https://qualla.com/national-bank-of-romania/ Photo credit Post of Romania, Public domain. The National Bank of Romania, BNR in Romanian abbreviation, was established in April 1880, only two years after Romania gained full independence from the Ottoman Empire. The bank's first governor was Ion Campineanu. The figure most associated with the institution's founding, howe...

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/x/f/s/national-bank-of-romania-wp/sxfs-national-bank-of-romania-founding-the-lei.mp3 0:06 2 full National Bank of Romania: The Old Palace https://qualla.com/national-bank-of-romania/ Photo credit Post of Romania, Public domain. On 26 February 1882, the French architects Cassien Bernard and Albert Galleron were assigned to design the bank's headquarters. They produced an eclectic late 19th-century building with neoclassical elements, on a site previously occupied by an inn built by the 17th-century Walla...

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/x/f/s/national-bank-of-romania-wp/sxfs-national-bank-of-romania-the-old-palace.mp3 0:06 3 full National Bank of Romania: The Romanian Treasure https://qualla.com/national-bank-of-romania/ Photo credit Britchi Mirela, CC BY-SA 3.0 ro. When German, Austro-Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Ottoman forces invaded Romania in 1916, the government retreated to Iasi in Moldavia and made a fateful decision: send the country's gold reserves and other valuables to Moscow for safekeeping under wartime alliance with Russia. Two s...

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/x/f/s/national-bank-of-romania-wp/sxfs-national-bank-of-romania-the-romanian-treasure.mp3 0:06 4 full National Bank of Romania: The Strange Robbery https://qualla.com/national-bank-of-romania/ Photo credit Public domain. On 28 July 1959, a group of six Jewish Romanians, all members of the Romanian Communist Party apparatus, were charged with stealing 1,600,000 lei, about 250,000 US dollars at the time, from an armored car of the National Bank of Romania. The case, known as the Ioanid Gang affair,...

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/x/f/s/national-bank-of-romania-wp/sxfs-national-bank-of-romania-the-strange-robbery.mp3 0:06 5 full