Station Palace

 

 

The station building, 133m long and with 113 rooms, is a real palace, and the central part imitates part of the loggia of the Doge's Palace in Venice. The palace was built by an Austrian company according to the plans of the architect Johan De Wacher. Ion Mitican, a historian from Iași, tells how the building was made in Venetian-Gothic style and that the palace was whitewashed in candy pink in a chromatic contrast with the green area (Bahlui plain), at the request of the people of Iași.

 

 

The Iași railway station is the largest in Moldova and was inaugurated on July 1, 1870, with the diversion to Iași of the Ițcani-Iași railway, a section connected in turn by the one that connected Vienna with Chernivtsi, Krakow and Lviv. At the same time, Gării Street was built.

 

The economic development of the city of Iasi, the capital of Moldova, also grew due to the international connection with Vienna, by rail, with the help of which merchants brought various goods for sale. The accessibility to the capital of Austria for a short time was lower than to the capital of Romania, Bucharest, so that some officials reached the Parliament from Iași to Bucharest via Vienna.

 

One of the biggest natural disasters in Romania took place in Iasi. In the summer of 1932 the city was hit by floods and the tragedy was "unparalleled" according to Ion Mitican, because unlike 1877 and 1897, now there were new neighborhoods built around the station, which were completely covered by water. To the irony of fate, the Station Palace was water to the windows and more than ever resembled even better the Doge's Palace in Venice.

 

The views are from the Eduard Ionescu collection, Cluj Napoca