On old postcards, the building on the seafront bears at least four names. Whoever puts them in order is, in effect, reading its history.
Bellona, the goddess
The building was raised by the Society of Disabled War Veterans as a seaside sanatorium and opened in August 1933. The name comes from mythology: Bellona was the Roman goddess of war, protector of those wounded in battle. The explanation was given at the opening itself, according to the newspaper Universul.
The sanatorium did not stay a sanatorium for long. In the spring of 1934 the building was leased out, and by the summer of that year newspaper advertisements were already inviting readers to the “Hotel Bellona” at Eforia. The name was spelt with a double l, like the goddess’s.
The years without a name
After the war and after nationalisation, the name disappears from postcards. A postcard mailed on 5 August 1955 shows the building with a slogan on its roof and calls it simply “Eforie – Sanatoriul” [Eforie – The Sanatorium]. Another, mailed on 18 August 1957, calls it the “Black Sea” Rest House.
People had not forgotten what it was called, though. In 1958, the magazine Arhitectura spoke of “the former Belona hotel”.
The return, with a single l
Towards the end of the 1960s, the name returns to paper as well. A postcard mailed in 1969 reads “Eforie Nord. Vila Belona”; one from 1973, “Plaja și hotelul Belona” [The beach and the Belona hotel]; one from 1976, “Eforie Nord. Hotel Belona”. Along the way, the word lost a letter: since then it has been spelt Belona, with a single l. In the meantime the beach below it also took its name, as a postcard from 1978 shows: “Plaja Belona” [Belona Beach].
The years above are the years of mailing, read from the postmark; the photographs may be a year or two older.
See all the postcards, in order →
The period photographs on this site come, for the most part, from the Andrei Ștomff Collection of the National Heritage Institute and from the Fortepan archive; the source and licence of each image are given in its caption.