Somewhere in the Argesului Valley, in a heavenly place, in Arefu, there is an estate where George Stefanescu (1843-1925), founder of the National Opera, musician who wrote the first Romanian symphony, conductor of the National Theater, teacher and created singing and opera at the Bucharest Conservatory, lived , having 37 series of students (an unprecedented fact), the creator of the singing school, a symbolic, innovative personality of the Romanian lyric scene.

The mansion, a museum since 1925 and of great memorial value to Romanian culture, houses rare works of art, from paintings by Gabriel Stefanescu-Arefi to antique Persian and Romanian carpets, original Versailles-style curtains, a collection of swords and icons, culminating in a piano by composer George Stefanescu, a Bosendorfer piano specially ordered in Vienna by his father Mihail Hagi-Stefan for his mother Maria Krecescu.

Do you know how much the paradise mansion where the national treasure is kept is worth? 700,000 euros including everything with objects, about how much a villa in Pieper costs. And still ten times less than the “imperial palace”, that is, the transformation of the building of the former party committee into a “one-room house”

Read on B365.ro why the composer’s great-granddaughter, Ilinca Stefanescu-Neagu, is forced to sell her family’s priceless heritage and why the Romanian state is not interested in buying and preserving cultural wealth