Tablouri de epocă (IV)
Old Paintings (IV)

Summary/Abstract: The author evokes two types of trade practiced during the Stalinist period in Romania: consignment stores and flea markets. Setting up some Consignment stores in old strategic commercial locations, discreet and central, was for obvious reasons: in the 1950s, the front show windows and especially the shelves had objects from the West, things that were not found at the time in state shops. Another form of state-controlled private trade, imported from the Soviet Union, was the flea market. In Bucharest, for example, it was first sited in Colentina, later moved to Dudeşti. Very animated in the 1950s, this kind of market was held exclusively on Sundays, frequented by cohorts of people. The flea market was an epic of poverty, destitution and despair. Everything that human fantasy created over the centuries was sold there.

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