A Heartfelt Farewell to Bucharest’s Iconic Stadium

The first match I attended in Giulesti was on November 23, 2006. It was a rainy and cold autumn evening in Bucharest and Rapid hosted the Czech side Mladá Boleslav for an unattractive League Europe group stage game.

The football was not great and the game ended up in a boring 1-1 draw, but I became a Giulesti regular from that day on.

I liked the atmosphere. It might have been the sense of family shared by those thousands of fans that fought the freezing weather, singing and jumping non-stop.

Perhaps it was also the good humour with which they went home after a disappointing 90 minutes of bad football. They seemed to react to the team's failures just as loving parents do to their children's shortcomings; I saw wisdom in that.

Every match day since that depressing Rapid-Mladá game, I walked from my flat to the Lutheran Church, where I bought a coke at the nearby convenience store and waited for the bus.

The vehicle filled up with Rapid fans as it advanced between elegant and decadent-looking villas, through the dark streets leading to Gara de Nord, Bucharest's main train station.

We all jumped out at the last stop before the stadium, where we merged into the mass of supporters walking towards the arena.

The spotlights illuminated the street and the stadium's peeling burgundy-coloured walls, which stood out against the dark grey blocks of Giulesti, the popular district that gives the field its name.

The stadium was built in the 1930s, during the interwar period, considered Romania's Golden Age. King Carol II and his son, the future king Michael, attended the opening ceremony.

Giulesti was designed after Highbury, London's former Arsenal home. Like the traditional British stadiums, it was located in the middle of...