Romanian Athenaeum in Bucharest

After hundreds of years of Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Imperial Russian rule in the region, the Kingdom of Romania was established in 1881, and Bucharest was chosen its capital city. In 1888, a new concert hall called the Romanian Athenaeum was built. It was just one of many new French-inspired buildings constructed in Bucharest in those years as its people strove to define their new capital. Unfortunately, many of those buildings were destroyed by the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu.