The roses of Elisabetin

On a November evening, 731 lamps came on across a provincial Habsburg town — and for a few years Timișoara was better lit than Vienna, Paris or Budapest.

Elisabetin is the quarter south of the Bega, a grid of streets laid out when Timișoara was still a fortress and the suburbs were where the workers lived. Parcul Rozelor sits inside that grid, on the east side of Bulevardul Vasile Pârvan, and it is not a large park. It holds no lake, no grand alley of chestnuts, no statue of a poet on a plinth. What it holds is roses. That is the point. The park was laid out in 1891, which makes it older than most of the buildings around it, and it has been destroyed and replanted at least once. What you walk through now is a reconstruction, though the soil is the same.

The name is straightforward: Parcul Rozelor, the Roses' Park. In Hungarian it was Rózsák tere, in German Rosenplatz. The three names are a reminder that this city changed hands and languages within living memory. The park was opened in 1891, when the rose was a fashionable plant and every self-respecting European city had a rosarium. Timișoara, then part of Austria-Hungary, wanted one too. The site chosen was a piece of ground between the built-up edge of Elisabetin and the embankment of the Bega, land that had been gardens and orchards. The layout was formal, with beds cut into geometric shapes and gravel walks between them. The roses were not native; they were cultivars, mostly from German and French nurseries, chosen for repeat flowering and scent.

What happened to the roses

The park survived the First World War, the change of borders in 1920, and the interwar years. It did not survive the Second World War and the years that followed. Timișoara was bombed by the Allies in 1944, and the park was damaged; the rose beds were dug up or trampled. After the war, the new communist authorities had little interest in a formal rose garden. The space was used for other purposes. By the 1960s, much of the original layout was gone. The open-air theatre that now stands at the north end of the park was built in that period, a functional concrete stage with a curved seating area, and it took up space that had been rose beds. The park was still called Parcul Rozelor, but the roses were a memory.

The replanting came after 1989. In the 1990s and 2000s, the city began to restore the park. New beds were cut, and new roses were planted. The varieties you see today are a mix of old and new: hybrid teas, floribundas, some shrub roses, and a few climbers against the pergola near the theatre. The labels are not always accurate, and some have weathered away. But the beds are full in June, which is when you should come if you want to see the park as it was meant to be seen. The first flush is the best; by August, the repeat bloomers are giving a second, thinner show, and the heat has taken the edge off.

The open-air theatre is at the north end of the park, a shallow bowl of concrete steps facing a stage with a back wall that once had a roof. It is used in summer for concerts, theatre, and the occasional film screening. The acoustics are not good. The stage faces a busy boulevard, and the traffic noise comes in. But on a warm evening, with the rose beds behind you and the sky still light at nine, it works. The theatre is not beautiful. It is a piece of 1960s infrastructure that has been patched and painted. But it is used, which is more than can be said for many such stages in Romanian parks. The seats are concrete; bring a cushion if you plan to stay.

The quarter around it

Elisabetin is not a rich quarter. It was built for workers and clerks, and the architecture reflects that: three- and four-storey apartment buildings from the early twentieth century, some with courtyards, some with shops at street level. The streets are named after flowers and trees — Strada Trandafirilor, Strada Lalelelor, Strada Viilor — which is either charming or sentimental, depending on your mood. The park is the only green space of any size. It is used by people who live in the blocks around it: mothers with prams, old men playing chess on the concrete tables near the entrance, teenagers sitting on the wall along Bulevardul Vasile Pârvan. In the morning, before the heat, there are runners. In the evening, there are couples.

The park says something about Elisabetin that the buildings do not. The quarter is dense, built up, and in summer the heat settles on it. The streets are mostly treeless. Parcul Rozelor is an exception: it has old trees, including a few large planes and lindens, and the shade they give is the reason many people come. The roses are the ornament, but the trees are the function. On a hot day in July, the benches under the lindens are full, and the rose beds are empty. That is not a failure of the park. It is a sign that the park is used for what a park is for.

The roses themselves are not labelled in any systematic way. There is no rosarium catalogue, no map of varieties. You will see deep reds, pale pinks, yellows, and a few striped roses that look like they belong in a different century. Some are fragrant; many are not. The modern varieties have been bred for disease resistance and repeat flowering, and scent has been sacrificed. If you want scent, look for the older beds near the south entrance, where some of the original varieties were replanted. They are more susceptible to blackspot and mildew, and by late summer they look tired. But in June, they are the best thing in the park.

The roses are the ornament, but the trees are the function.

Practicalities

The park is open all the time. There is no gate, no opening hours, no entry fee. It is a public park in the ordinary sense. The rose beds are at their best from late May to mid-June, and again, less spectacularly, in September. July and August are hot, and the park is better in the early morning or late evening. There is no café inside the park, but there are shops on Bulevardul Vasile Pârvan and on Strada Ștefan cel Mare, a few minutes' walk away. The nearest tram stop is at Piața Nicolae Bălcescu, on the line that runs along the boulevard. Toilets are a problem; there are none in the park, and the nearest public facilities are in the market hall at Piața Bălcescu, which is not always clean.

The park is not a destination in itself. It is a quarter park, and it is best visited as part of a walk through Elisabetin. If you are in Timișoara for a few days, you might come here after seeing Piața Unirii and the cathedral, and before or after the Fabric district. It is a twenty-minute walk from the city centre, across the Bega and along Bulevardul Vasile Pârvan. The walk is not pretty — the boulevard is busy and the buildings are ordinary — but it is real. Elisabetin is not a museum quarter. It is where people live.

What the park says about the quarter is simple: it says that even a dense, working-class district needs a place to sit under a tree. The roses are a bonus. They were planted in 1891 because a city wanted to be elegant. They were destroyed because history is not elegant. They were replanted because someone decided that a park called Rozelor should have roses. That is not a grand narrative. It is the story of most parks in most cities. But it is true, and it is worth a visit.