There was a time when the city was adorned with oriental scents, in which gentlemen with jobs and ladies in elegant dresses walked, in beautifully decorated carriages, on the boulevards of Little Paris. Our story does not begin now, but in a distant past, when La Belle Epoque represented the present.

At number 56, opposite the National Theater, 19th-century travelers could find the Grand Hotel Broft. A chic little hotel built in the chic style of Parisian hotels. Precisely due to this air of French elegance so appreciated by the Romanian society of those times, the Broft Hotel became one of the meeting points of the Bucharest aristocracy and elite.

Among the most famous guests is Prince Napoleon, Napoleon III’s cousin, who was on a diplomatic visit to Charles I of Hohenzollern. And the famous French merchant Jobin was accommodated at the Grand Hotel Broft. His imprint on the fashion world of those times was so strong that, even today, Romanians call the high hat he brought from France – joben.

Grand Hotel Broft and number 56 of Mogoșoaiei Bridge played a symbolic role in the history of modern Romania. At the end of the Russo-Romanian-Turkish War, with the defeat of Ottoman troops in Pleven in 1877, Osman Pasha, the leader of the Ottoman army, was detained in apartment 104 before being deported to Russia. An old story says that during the victory march, when Prince Carol I’s troops were crossing the Mogoșoaiei Bridge, Osman Pasha greeted Carol from the window of his apartment. That march would leave its mark on the history of Bucharest, changing the name of its most important boulevard in Calea Victoriei.