The summer of 1977 began astronomically on June 21st, a Thursday, at precisely 1:07 p.m. That same day, out in the fields on the outskirts of Bucharest, torches were lit in a ritual effort to ward off pests. And it was on that very afternoon that Savva and Lana met for the first time — at the far end of Grigore Mora Street, a narrow slip of road wedged between Calea Dorobanți and the Zambaccian Museum, along the outer edge of the Mornand subdivision.

You know the street. Once aristocratic, later bourgeois, it survived communism with a kind of quiet dignity, only to be undone by the newly rich in their relentless march toward capitalism. It’s a street that should have borne the name of Marcel Iancu — or one of his many identities: Hermann Janko, Cabaret Voltaire, Contimporanul. It remains, perhaps, the only street in the world that houses, just three doors apart, two of his architectural signatures: the Florica Reich House at number 39, and the Paul Wexler Villa at 36.

Today, the street itself seems to confirm — bitterly and with irony — one of Iancu’s own maxims: “The great secret is here: thinking happens in the mouth.” In the mouths of the ignorant, the uncultured, and the obscenely wealthy — those who, by some cruel twist of history, have come to live there.

I loved Grigore Mora Street for its ability to endure — to bend without breaking, to deceive with elegance when necessary. And yet, after weathering a century of upheaval, it was finally undone by the very people meant to preserve it: the Wexler villa disfigured by a graceless vertical addition that shattered its proportions; the Florica house, slowly erased by neglect.