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!
