history & legacy
Echoes opened its doors on October 1st 2022, building upon the legacy of Have a Cigar, in the same villa at No. 11 Dianei St. and morphing the concept inspired by Pink Floyd into something new in design and yet familiar in spirit.
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 says, 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 sprung up as an idea in late June 2022. 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, among others.
