Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
Image 1: Christian Roma Family Palace (Constanta) Photocredit F. Ruegg
Palaces
Since the fall of the former regime, Gypsy palaces have been built in every region of
Romania. According to one of the few rigorous, though strictly architectural/ethnographical,
studies of the palaces (Gräf 2002), all of them were only built after 1989 in Romania.
However, we have been able to visit a Gypsy
mahala
in the city of Soroca in the North of the
Republic of Moldova, where similar palaces have been built before this date. These palaces
show globally the same features as the Romanian ones. They reproduce some famous
historical monuments or imitate Western and Eastern styles, from French mansard roofs to
Soviet triumphal youth palaces.
In Romania there is a tendency to build
à la française
in the West, near Timisoara for
example, or to use a more Rococo style partly imitated from the bourgeois urban national
Romanian style. Gräf also distinguishes the western palaces in Banat following western
models (neoclassicism) that are both local imitations and more recent ones in Transylvania,
following local models of architecture, particularly Baroque and Rococo churches built under
the Austrians in the 18
th
and 19
th
Centuries. In Southern Moldavia they follow the Neo-
Romanesque Romanian style from the beginning of the 20
th
century. Hence, Neo-classical
14
