How did this come to be? Well, here is the story.

Places are said to be only as good as the people making them. Some places, even more so, tend to retain whatever character those people imbued. They carry on having a vibe, albeit shifting and transforming. This is a short story about such a place and the people that made it.

Back in 2013, Have a Cigar popped up in a chic little apartment near Sala Dalles in Bucharest. The first Pink Floyd inspired bar in the city, in the country, and the only one for a radius of who knows how many hundreds of miles. I was there within the first week, given the theme of the place. I became a regular, but this was due to the people there, and not the music.

One year later, in 2014, the bar moved to the place it would become legendary for: a spacious villa with a lush little terrace at  No. 11 Dianei Street, a stone’s throw from Rosetti Sq.

For eight years hence that particular endeavour was responsible for a myriad of incredible people crossing paths and forming lifelong friendships, and more—some have even found their wives and husbands, others gathered together in bands. It became a retreat for many artists and bon vivants, in all their particular styles.

And, as Vonnegut would say, so it goes. For years, so it went. Then the lockdown happened. The core of Have a Cigar was put to the test and they managed to weather it. But at a cost. One that bore with it changes and shifts and exhaustion. One that eventually led them to call it a day, sometime in June this year.

And yet, something happened. When Seba, Alexandra and Didi, the ones that held this place together for so many years, announced that this had been it, some of the people that I mentioned earlier had another idea. Some of them decided that this legacy was too important to go to waste. And some did something about it.

So came about a new chapter. 

Echoes popped up as an idea in late June. It stuck and grew and morphed and adapted. It took that legacy and built on it and fleshed it out. They threw in, besides Pink Floyd, some other (somehow connected in one way or another) sources of inspiration, among which, works by Kubrick, Vonnegut, Warhol, and many others. Now, in late September, the place is about to become reality.

In that same villa on No. 11 Dianei Street, Echoes opens its doors on October 1st (perhaps, silently, a couple of days before, but those might be just rumours). 

And remember what I said earlier about people crossing paths and forming friendships and whatnot over drinks and in the vibe of Have a Cigar? Well, the people behind Bucharest Graphic Days and the ones behind Echoes are such cases. And the coincidence of it? Both open their doors on October 1st. It would have been a shame had they not met and discussed and made it so that Echoes would be the official hub of this festival. 

I’m going to keep the short story short, since it’s in an incipient phase too. This is a chapter that is yet to be written and I hope to meet many of the people attending Graphic Days, over drinks and in the vibe of Echoes, and write that chapter together.