Titulescu’s tea on the terrace of the Bellona is a small incident, preserved in a newspaper item.
The newspaper Dimineața of 19 June 1935 recorded, in its society column, that Nicolae Titulescu and his wife had given a tea “on the terrace of the Bellona hotel”. It is an item of just a few lines, but it says a great deal about what the hotel meant in those years.
Who the host was
In 1935, Nicolae Titulescu was Romania’s foreign minister and one of the best-known diplomats in Europe: he had twice presided over the Assembly of the League of Nations, in 1930 and in 1931. That he received his guests on the terrace of a hotel opened only a year earlier shows how quickly the Bellona had risen among the best addresses on the coast.
The terrace, the resort’s meeting place
It was no exception. The season reports of 1937 mention the hotel’s terraces and lobby as a meeting place of the resort, and the Enciclopedia României, in the volume published in 1938, names two luxury hotels at Eforia: the Bellona and the Neptun.
The colour photograph at the beginning of the article shows the same terrace a quarter of a century later, in 1960: tables with red and green tablecloths, and below them the crowded beach and the sea. (Fortepan / Heinzely Béla, CC BY-SA 3.0)
From Titulescu’s tea to today’s coffee
The terrace is still there, above the beach. The hotel’s café bar opens here, so anyone who wishes can drink their coffee in the place where Titulescu received his guests for tea, in June 1935. The rest of the building’s story is on the History of the place page.
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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.