Entertainment and leisure in the old town of Ploiesti
The sizzling town of Ploiesti in the early 1920s
Christine Leșcu, 03.12.2023, 14:00
An oil-extraction town, the seat of a mountainous county, therefore a town with a remarkable tourist potential, Ploiesti, in the inter-war years, was a thriving town, with lots of entertaining opportunities. Some of these entertaining opportunities were even imported from Bucharest by the Ploiesti town dwellers, who were eager to compete with the Bucharest city dwellers on an equal footing. One such important entertaining habits was the big flower fight, which in Bucharest was staged at the Promenade, that is on the then northern outskirts of Romania’s capital city. In the Prahova town, the flower fight started before World War One and was resumed when the war ended. It was a spring entertainment that came to a close in late June, once the holidays began. When and how the flower fight was staged in Ploiesti, we will find out all about that from the author of a book entitled Once Upon a Time in Ploiesti. Flower Fights, football and beauty contests, Lucian Vasile.
The flower fight was an imported habit, to Ploiesti from the Capital city, before World War One. The Promenade in Bucharest was replaced by the Ploiesti boulevard, on a smaller scale, by all means, yet with the same passion, the same verve and the same popular revolt. Perhaps in Ploiesti it was more intense since it was a smaller town, the green areas were a lot fewer, so cutting the boulevard off from the community circuit at the weekend caused the revolt of those who were unable to afford taking part in that kind of entertainment. That is why, in the 1920s or thereabouts, several newspaper articles were issued, writing that, anyway, the green spaces around town were scarce, which simply deprived the town’s downtrodden and ostracized people of one of their very few recreation areas. Everything came to a standstill on the Saint Peter and Paul’s Feast, when the school year also came to a close in the town’s most important high-school. It had Peter and Paul as patron saints. And it was the time when the town fell asleep. The scorcher back then was, if you will, quite similar with the scorcher we have these days, so the posh people left town, leaving for various resorts abroad, or retiring to their residences in the region, usually lying around Ploiesti.
The flower fight was mostly affordable for the rank and fashion, yet the more modest town dwellers amused themselves in funfairs, which gained their momentum in early autumn, when the crops were harvested, especially when the grapes were harvested.
Historian Lucian Vasile:
If the flower fight was the sign that the life of the town in early summer came to an end, three months later, in early autumn, a funfair was mounted, At the Cannons, that’s how it was called, it opened the new school year as well as a new season of the highlife. Then the town’s posh people returned to their residences in Ploiesti. But, rather, that was how the rank and file amused themselves. The grape juice ignored the social status, so having fun like that was extremely affordable, since at that funfair all sorts of vendors arrived, offering very cheap and simple entertainment: from the Merry-go-round to target shooting, to the boxer punch machines where you could test your force. It was the entertainment for commoners, it lasted for about between 4 and 6 weeks and could have lasted longer had the cold weather not set in, forcing people to retire in beerhouses, restaurants and taverns.
However, Ploiesti town dwellers were also into football. With details on that, here is historian Lucian Vasile again.
This sports discipline saw a spectacular rise. Around 1907, 1908 it barely had any fans in Ploiesti and people thought it was a waste of time, they even thought it was a weird kind of sports discipline. Well, 20-30 years later, not only was Ploiesti a hub of national football, but also it had two teams that used to duel each other, yet also competing on the country’s central football stage. It was, on one hand, Prahova, which was the traditional team subsidized the Dutch industry tycoon Jacob Kopes and there was Tricolorul, the Tricolor, the team of the Ploiesti-Valeni Railway Society. It was a very profitable society which of course had tremendous sums of money at its fingertips, sums it splashed here and there, yet with a hardly encouraging outcome. They were unable to win the championship, nay, they even were relegated. Yet they were famous in the late 1930s, for the bonuses and the salaries they paid. But at that time as well, football ended up in brawls, in fights. There was a time, in the late 1920s or thereabouts, when the police prefect himself entered the pitch and started punching people and kicking them with his legs, because he was mad the local team had been defeated.
A multi-ethnic town, Ploiesti also witnessed ways of spending leisure time through habits and customs imported by the foreigners who settled in the city. A telling example of that is the German community, which was quite numerous. Here is the historian Lucian Vasile, with more on that.
They built a hall for their community, a hall on the foundation of which today’s Philharmonics Building in town was erected. As early as the late 19th century, the members of the German community convened there, they had a choir and organized all sorts of games: bowling and snooker. What was really new in the town’s life was the fact that here women rubbed shoulders with men, being allowed to play, they were not discriminated against. For the then patriarchal world, that came as a curiosity, how was it possible that, with the Germans, women played snooker alongside men, with no discrimination. Otherwise, the other communities were rather well integrated, and not that anxious to preserve their separate identity. They were trying to integrate.
Unfortunately, once with the paucity and the restrictions the communist regime brought with it from 1947 onwards, many of these entertainment and leisure opportunities disappeared, just as people’s good humor disappeared.
