“There are places in which the human patience could easily be rooted and where time seems to stop in order to become concrete in harmonious forms. Mogosoaia is such a place, meant for duration, separated from the present of time in order to display to the ephemeral fashions an image of the Romanian permanence. Mogosoaia is not only a princely residence, a lonely landscape or a great ruling. Mogosoaia is a sphere, an entire part of a country, a landscape taken from reminiscence, founded by the creative ambition of a series of generations that organized their lives for the functioning of their principles and their aspirations…. Mogosoaia is not only the image of the past, but also the expression of a live present, the testimony of a becoming. This is why Mogosoaia occupies such a special place among the historical monuments of Romania”.
This is how the refined and the erudite architect G.M. Cantacuzino, the one that would restore it during the time of Martha Bibescu and that would re-offer its solemn greatness it had during the times of Constantin Brancoveanu, described the palace of Mogosoaia. At it was still G. M. Cantacuzino the one considering that Mogosoaia “is a palace with no correspondent on the entire territory of Walachia”, the home of the brilliant prince, with no added richness and without the ostentation of the surroundings”, having “in its solitude, a smiling sterness”.
Among all Constantin Brancoveanu’s residences (Mogosoaia, Potlogi, Doicesti, Brancoveni, Sambata de Sus), the palace at Mogosoaia is not only the most refined, but also the best preserved to our day, a happy set of circumstances and its inheritance by Martha Bibescu – who restored the monument carefully, rendering it the splendour it once had had – saved from destruction a pearl of our residential architecture. Unlike the palace at Potlogi, reconstituted out of a shapeless pile of ruins in the l960s, in the exterior architecture of Mogosoaia’s, the basic elements of the Brancovan style can still be admired.
On January 28, 1681, the great postelnic /chief administrator/ Constantin Brancoveanu bought Mogosoaia, a village bordered by lake and forest sited at approx. 15 km. northwest of Bucharest. Three months later, on April 7, Brancoveanu bought another plot of land in the area, paying for the whole estate – 1390 stanjens /approx. 3000 m./ – 670 1/2 ughis /Hungarian coins/.
