The Dalles Family and Foundation
The Dalles Foundation is a place Bucharesters are very familiar with.
România Internațional, 20.02.2016, 14:26
Lying at the heart of Romania’s capital city Bucharest, on one of the city’s great thoroughfares and quite close to the University building, the Dalles Foundation is a place Bucharesters are very familiar with. However, facts about those who founded it and gave its name are less known, that is members of the Dalles family. Speaking now is the historian Dan Falcan, providing an outline of the family’s past.
”Ioan Dalles was of Greek origin, and his parents had arrived in the Romanian Principalities during the Phanariot period, just like many other Greeks. He was born in 1816 and became a merchant during his years of maturity. With the money he made from the business he bought a couple of estates, the most important being the one in Bucsani, Dambovita County, close by the town of Targoviste. It was a large and beautiful estate, purchased from princess Cleopatra Trubetskoy who had a famous house on the Victoria Road, which can be admired to this day. The Bucsani estate had a surface area of more than 100 hectares. Ioan Dalles married Elena Anastasescu, daughter of some landowners from Dambovita. Together they amassed a great fortune, the family being rated as one of the richest in the country, at that time, before 1918. The family was very hardworking, very dedicated to the people of those places and took great care of the peasants working on their estate. “
That was the reason why, in 1907, the year of the great peasant uprisings, the Bucsani estate and the Dalles family were spared from the rage of the mutineers. But for all their being hardworking, honest and considerate, members of the family seem to have been haunted by bad luck and tragedy. With details on that, here is historian Dan Falcan one again.
”From Ioan G. Dalles’s marriage to Elena, three children resulted. Unfortunately, the elder one, George, died when he was only three, since at that time juvenile mortality rate was extremely high. Then they had a daughter, Dora, who was born in 1875, but who died in 1892, when she was only 17 as a result of unrequited love. But old Ioan Dalles had died in the meantime. We need to say Ioan Dalles was 33 years older than his wife, which was quite appreciable. However, they made a happy and united couple. So Ioan G. Dalles died in 1886, and their youngest child, Ioan I. Dalles, better known as Jean Dalles, the one who gave the name of today’s foundation, died rather young, at the age of 40. “
Once Jean Dalles died, the family’s fortune and business were taken over by his mother. Elena Dalles would actually be the one thanks to whom the family’s name will make history. Surviving all sorts of misfortunes, she did not give up on her ideals, nor did she stray away from the charity-giving path, for a single moment. And that’s how the Dalles Foundation was born, of Elena’s desire. With details on that, here is historian Dan Falcan once again.
”No matter how hard fate hit her, she believed her big fortune must be made available to the others, so that she may be able to do as much good as possible. After Jean Dalles’ death, she took the decision to set up a foundation bearing the name of her son, aimed at promoting Romanian cultural values. Elena Dalles died in 1921 and her will stipulated that her entire fortune, accounting for more than 20 million lei, should be donated to the Romanian Academy, so that the foundation could be set up. Unfortunately, legal entanglements and the international economic crisis that broke out, postponed the setting up of the foundation until 1932, 11 years after Elena’s death. The ultimate aim of the foundation was the education of the Romanians. It was some sort of an open-to-everyone university. Anyone was free to attend its courses. The courses were offered by leading names of science and culture of the interwar period, such as historian Nicolae Iorga, composers George Enescu and Mihail Jora, writers Camil Petrescu and Mihail Sadoveanu.”
Designed by architect Horia Theodoru and built by engineer Emil Prager, the building of the Dalles Foundation today is partially covered by a block of flats built by the communists in the 1950s. Yet despite that, the reputation of the foundation, which was operational as an open university during the communist regime as well, has in no way been marred by anything.
