Melik House

Situated on 22, Spătarului Street and built somewhere between 1750-1760, Melik House (Romanian: Casa Melik) is the oldest civilian building from Bucharest that was preserved in its original form.

Nobody knows who the first owner of the house was, but it was sold in 1815 by its heirs to an Armenian merchant named Chevorc Nazaretoglu – his real name being Nazaretian. Chevroc Nazaretian and his wife moved in the house in 1822. Agop Nazaretian, Chevorc’s son, dowered the house to his daughter Ana,at her marriage with the architect Iacob Melik. Melik, who studied in Paris and participate actively in the revolution of 1848, wass bound to go into exile in France and Turkey. In return, after nine years of exile, he found the house in ruins. After repairs in November, will live here with his wife. The name of the house comes from Iacob Melik who lived here together with his family and who repaired the house many times.

Ana Nazaretian Melik, who died in 1913, bequeathed the house to the Armenian community from Bucharest, with the wish to found an asylum for the poor widows of the community. Eugen Melik, descendant, attacked the will and got the property for a short period of time, but the Armenian community won the trial and an asylum was arranged that functioned between 1921-1947. During this period, different tenants lived in the house and it suffered modifications and degradations.

Towards the end of the 1960s, Gheorghe and Serafina Raut, husband and wife, negotiated with the authorities of Bucharest the donation and partial redemption of the art collection they owned. While a student in Paris, Theodor Pallady lived in one of the Raut family apartments, in Place Dauphin. Raut family maintained a special relationship with the painter and the main condition of the donation was to provide a valuable display space for their art collection, who included many Pallady's works, and to host the Pallady Museum. Casa Melik was thus selected to house the valuable collection.

Last renovation of the house was in 1979. Between 1970-1994, the National Art Museum from Bucharest used it as a place to deposit valuable works of art that were going to be restored or those being in transit. In 1994 it has gained its final destination – Casa Melik, Serafina and Gheorghe Raut Art Collection and Pallady Museum – museal complex.

The size of the rooms, the breadth of the windows and the width of the doors were preserved inside the house, the pieces of furniture are entirely pieces of collection. The closed veranda hosts every Saturday morning courses of initiation for children in the art of drawing and color.

Ideea and images: Jurnal Românesc. Infos: Romania Explorer. Thanks!

Theodor Pallady

Theodor Pallady (April 11, 1871, Iaşi — August 16, 1956, Bucharest), great Romanian painter and draughtsman.


He studied painting from the age of 15 under the Tyrolean painter Fidelis Walch. Between 1887 and 1889, he studied engineering at the Dresden University of Technology, where he also had painting lessons with Erwin Oehme who, recognising his artistic intuition, suggested that he went to Paris.


He decided to abandon his proposed career in engineering to dedicate himself to painting, and in 1889 he moved to Paris to attend the studio of Edmond Aman-Jean. In 1891 he and enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts (Académie des Beaux-Arts), where he studied first under Gustave Moreau (he had as colleagues Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault, and Albert Marquet), and after Moreau's death in 1897 he became a student of Aimé Morot and Fernand Cormon. Among his near contemporaries were Henri Matisse and André Rouveyre, with whom he had a lasting friendship and correspondence. He frequented the studio of Puvis de Chavannes, whose wife, Marie Cantacuzene, was related to him.


He exhibited for the first time in the Salon and the Exposition Universelle in 1900 in Paris. His first one-man exhibition in Bucharest was in 1904 at the Atheneum, and after settling in Paris in 1906 he had further exhibitions at the Galerie Nunés et Fiquot (1920) and at the Galerie Eugène Blot (1928). He also exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1924, 1940 and 1942.


Pallady was influenced by the Symbolist environment of the late 19th century, and his paintings before 1916 contain Symbolist motifs, sometimes with echoes of Moreau and Puvis de Chavannes. His drawings and colouring show a debt to Renaissance tradition, and his landscapes, which were sometimes large-scale, owe much to the vision of Romania made popular by Nicolae Grigorescu and Ion Andreescu. Around 1920 his style began to show the influence of the analytical drawing of Cubism. His friendship with Matisse was of equal importance: Pallady introduced Matisse to the attraction of Romanian embroidered blouses which formed a recurrent theme in Matisse's work, and Matisse probably encouraged Pallady to use heightened colours a range of subject-matter similar to that employed by Matisse in the 1920s. This diversification was not to last: he came to concentrate on views of Paris and of the south of France, but he also portrayed women, or nudes in interior compositions, as well as painting still-lifes and self-portraits. He was an indefatigable draughtsman, producing numerous drawings of his impressions of nature and also of his observations of Parisian or Bucharest café society. The largest collection of his paintings and drawings is in the National Arts Museum in Bucharest.