What’s it all about?

What if you could walk through Bucharest just as it was becoming one of Europe’s most intriguing capitals?

Step into the city’s Golden Age, from the 1870s to the eve of World War II — a time of kings and queens, ambitious architects, aristocrats, bankers, artists, journalists, musicians, glamorous cafés… and more than a few notorious love affairs.

In just a few decades, Bucharest transformed from a provincial Balkan capital into a city determined to look — and live — like Paris, Vienna and the great capitals of Western Europe.

This is not a traditional history lecture.

We’ll bring this Bucharest back to life through the people who shaped it.

Meet King Carol I, the foreign prince who set out to modernize an entire country; Queen Elisabeth, poet and patron of the arts; King Ferdinand and Queen Marie, who presided over one of Romania’s defining eras; and the charismatic and controversial Carol II, whose private life was almost as dramatic as his reign.

Along the way, grand palaces and elegant boulevards become the backdrop for stories of power, ambition, art, money, romance, scandal and reinvention.

What you’ll discover

You’ll see a different Bucharest beneath the modern city: elegant and eccentric, ambitious and chaotic, glamorous and scandalous — and surprisingly modern.

Come walk through the Bucharest that existed before the world changed forever.