Documented
Excavations on the hills above the river show people living here long before Bucharest is named in writing. Its floods, and the works to control them, are recorded from the 19th century on.
01Places of BUCARESDAVA
The Dâmbovița
The river as it may have looked around AD 105, long before Bucharest. The same river runs through every era of BUCARESDAVA.
- Shown
- c. AD 105
- Period
- Older than the city
- Status
- In a concrete channel
- Location
- 22 km across Bucharest
01The history
A river older than the city.
The Dâmbovița rises in the Făgăraș Mountains and runs south-east to join the Argeș near Budești. On the way it crosses Bucharest for about 22 km, from north-west to south-east. Sources put its total length anywhere between 237 and 286 km.
People lived along it long before there was a city. Excavations on the Mihai Vodă and Radu Vodă hills, both on the river bank, found traces of Bronze Age and Iron Age settlement, and Dacian sites elsewhere in today’s Bucharest have produced Greek coins and local copies of them from the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. In AD 105 Trajan began his second war against the Dacians. A year later Dacia was a Roman province.
For most of Bucharest’s history the river was shallow, crooked and quick to flood. In March 1865 the water rose up to three metres between Grozăvești and Vitan. In the 1880s it was straightened into a channel, following plans drawn up by the city engineer Grigore Cerchez, and in 1985–1987 it was set into the concrete trough it runs through today.
- AD 105
Trajan’s second war against the Dacians begins.
- 1459
Vlad III dates a charter from the fortress of Bucharest, on the Dâmbovița.
- 1865
A March flood covers the river’s course from Grozăvești to Vitan.
- 1880s
The river is straightened into a channel on Grigore Cerchez’s plans.
- 1930s
A concrete slab covers it under today’s Piața Unirii.
- 1987
A concrete channel, a collector canal and Lacul Morii are finished.
02Three ways to read it
What is known, what is told, what is imagined.
Legend
A folk verse from the early 19th century says “Dâmboviță, apă dulce, cine o bea nu se mai duce”: sweet water, whoever drinks it never leaves. Nobody knows who wrote it.
BUCARESDAVA
Chapter I opens on its banks in AD 105, when a boy named Duras finds an object he has already seen in a dream. The river is the one setting every chapter shares.
03Today
What remains today.
The Dâmbovița now runs through a concrete trough beside the city’s main east–west road. At its western end Lacul Morii, a reservoir built over the old Crângași neighbourhood, holds back floods. Under Piața Unirii the river disappears beneath a concrete slab laid in the 1930s.