In the area around the Lake Morii there were houses. When they came to pull them down, it did not matter if one was home or not. Some of them weren?t. They took their furniture , clothes out in the street and pulled down the houses. Besides the houses, they pulled down a nearby graveyard, if one can use the word ?pulled down?. Meaning that they informed the people to move the graves, and if they didn?t the demolition still continued. In order to build the passage Lujer they pulled down a block because according to the plans it was believed that the bridge would intersect the line. After the demolition, they realized they had been wrong. A lot of houses in different areas were pulled down: in the Vacaresti area, in order to make an artificial lake, in the Uranus area to build the House of People. The hospitals weren?t protected either, for instance the hospital Brancovenesc where they built Unirii shop. They pulled down everything and they were going to build food stores, those that are called today ? The Circuses of Hunger?. (I. I., 92)

Maybe our behavior is such that we do not appreciate what we have until we are about to lose it. It?s like in the families, any time somebody dies or gets sick, we rush to the photographs, to keep a record of them, by writing dates on them.

That?s what happened to our house, built by grandfather in 1906, near the square in front of the monastery Antim, just opposite Poienescu school, round the corner to the Palace of Justice. I did not like this house particularly much, even if it had a yard with flowers in front and an orchard in the back. In the summer of ?82 a cousin of mine, an architect told us that one was considering pulling down the Antim area. They were discussing moving the library of the monastery and the Nuns? Hermitage. It was obvious it was going to be painful. We wrote countless reports and received countless answers that our house wouldn?t be pulled down, but in the end, they pulled us down. They had began the demolitions upwards, from the Uranus area, from Cazarmii area up to Mihai Voda.

I think that it was something striking; if we are to see what is happening now, the demolitions were obviously a form of terror and not an economic-related thing. Because the orders from above were to destroy and not to save the objects with patrimonial value. On the other hand after 90 we saw that ?they? actually appreciated these things. Doina Uricariu knew Mrs. Murnu, who tried to publish the memoirs of Murnu. She had a young friend working at the Patrimonial Authority, who used to come and listen to the stories about the maestro. And one of these girls told Doina that near Olteni street a house was pulled down and that house had a wonderful Meissen stove, which could be bought. We went to see it and the demolitions were just 4 houses away. It seems even Iorga had wanted to buy this house with a verandah in the ?30, but he hadn?t agreed with the owners. The house was inhabited by two old ladies, some magistrates? widows, former teachers; they were not rich persons. But these unsophisticated houses had things of a rare beauty inside, which were due to a savoir-habiter typical for the Romanian bourgeoisie. The stove was very big, with a fireplace; both on the right and the left, they were two benches with backs, also made in terracotta, in a greenish color. The model was a painted asparagus with a pink point. They sold it to us for 5000 lei, that was approximately one and a half monthly salary, but we had to find a truck that could take it and a stove-maker who would know how to disassemble it. We took the glass partition with beveled crystal and an absolutely superb bathtub, when the truck came. We took them almost for free, but the old ladies were glad they could come from time to time to visit their objects. We would have been happy to find somebody to use the beautiful things of our house in Antim, for instance we could not save the staircase, because it couldn?t be set just anywhere.