Bucharest and floods were a combination difficult to separate a century ago. Currently, the streets of the capital only flood after torrential rain and sewage overflows, and in the interwar period it was not fun at all with floods breaking through both cobblestone and asphalt streets in the center, as well as mud on the outskirts. If you want to know which neighborhood was the “Venice” of Bucharest or how popular Shoshone and galoshes were in the interwar period, we invite you to read the following lines.

There was mud and filth in almost every season: in the spring because of the thaw, in the summer because of torrential rains, in the fall again because of the rains, and in the winter the snow mixed with the slush and made a brown slush that covered a large part of the city. In the warmer months, the mud dried and turned into slush, which made it impossible to breathe in the streets when trolleys, trams or buses passed by.

Paul Moran, a French novelist who was the French ambassador in Bucharest, described in 1935 the situation in the capital during the melting of the snow: “Thaw. On the outskirts of Bucharest, it returns to its original marshy state. However, often the last frost unexpectedly strengthens it; then, under the bright stars, the ground is so slippery that the night passer-by can barely keep his feet. In the end, the snow redoubts are finally destroyed, and the mud sung by all the passers-by drowns the slums and seems to dissolve the cobblestones; sprayed by buses, it spills onto the sidewalks and soaks houses up to the eaves. When cars drive by, pedestrians run away as if under a rain of ice bombs. Cars are no longer protected by fenders: when the sun comes out again, you see them covered in a crust of dried manure. Everything melts, everything flows, and the swollen sewer crackles with a warm, fetid stench.”

Read on B365.ro why Militari was the “Venice” of the planet Bucharest.