Ateneul Roman, a Historic Concert Hall

The beautiful concert hall, Ateneul Roman, was built on land owned by the Romanian Association of Equitation. The association was planning to build a circular arena for equitation however, for an unknown reason, the project was abandoned after the circular foundation was built.

When the land was sold, the decision was made to build an opera house, Ateneul Roman. The French architect, Albert Galleron, did not demolish the foundation, instead he decided to build on top of it.

The problem was that the state did not have money. Enter Scarlat Rosetti, who made a huge donation, but it was insufficient. The state decided in 1885 to run a public fund-raising lottery promoted under the banner, “dati un leu pentru Ateneu.” (give a coin for the Ateneu). Surprisingly, thousands of people bought tickets with the silver coin (4.17 g silver) called ‘leu’ and 12,300 tickets were sold.

In the presence of King Carol I, the foundation stone was placed on October 26, 1886. Ateneul Roman was inaugurated two years later on February 14,1888.

The forty-one meters tall cupola was built with twenty steel arches weighing forty-two metric tons. It was shipped in pieces from Germany and assembled in Bucharest. The most beautiful feature of the building is the twenty-five meters long and three meters tall fresco of various scenes from Romania’s history. The painter, Costin Petrescu, spent five years creating his masterpiece, consulting at times with historian Nicolae Iorga, to make sure that the details were historically accurate.

After the communists took power in 1948, the beautiful fresco was covered with a red velvet curtain, which ultimately saved it from destruction. The fresco’s images of kings, churches, palaces, and other bourgeois symbols offended the ideological sensibilities of the communists.

For decades, the communists destroyed everything that reminded them of the old regime, beautiful statues, buildings, paintings, art objects, books, and frescoes.

Without explanation, in 1966, the red curtain came down. The communists moved on to other places to destroy and forgot about Ateneul Roman. However, the last scene of the fresco, which depicted King Carol II and his son Mihai, was destroyed, and replaced by a frame of communist agitators with their hammer and sickle red flags.

If this is reminiscent of the destruction of statues of American heroes in 2020-2021, the renaming of schools, streets, roads, highways, universities, it is because the destroyers are the twenty-first century communist agitators who are attempting to take over America. That is how communists operate and communism spreads!