For almost a century the locals have called it “the ship on the seafront”, and anyone seeing it for the first time understands why.
Anyone who walks down to the beach and looks back towards the seafront understands the nickname at once. The seaward end of the building is rounded like a prow, the balconies curve around it like decks, and a few windows are round, like portholes. It is no accident, nor a joke of the locals: it was designed that way.
A building set with its bow towards the sea
The plans belong to the architect George Matei Cantacuzino, who also drew up, between 1930 and 1934, the layout of the plots along the Eforie seafront. Almost all the houses on a shore sit with their long side facing the water. Cantacuzino did the opposite: he placed the building perpendicular to the shore, like a ship hauled up on land. The gain is practical, not just a matter of image. The rooms face south and east, so they have sun in the morning and light all day, and the wide balconies open towards the sea on both sides.
The foundation stone was laid on Saturday, 22 October 1932, and in August 1933 the building was inaugurated.
What the newspapers wrote
The resemblance was noticed from the start. In July 1937, a newspaper described the hotel as a huge four-storey ship that thrusts its prow, a concrete terrace, straight into the sea. A year later, on 10 August 1938, Neamul Românesc wrote of “the Bellona hotel with its distinctly marine architecture”.
Nor did it go unnoticed abroad. In 1934, the Parisian magazine L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui published its photograph and plan and noted that, at Eforie, a single architect had been able to build an entire beach: a few villas and a hotel.
What remains of the ship on the seafront
The shape is the same today. Hotel Belona is a Grade A historic monument, the grade for monuments of national value, entered in the List of Historic Monuments under the code CT-II-m-A-02880. Anyone who wants to check the nickname has only one thing to do: walk down the steps to the beach and turn around.
The whole story of the building, year by year →
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.