The “Mihai Băcescu” Water Museum, a public forum monument of national importance, located on the Nicolae Beldiceanu Street, was inaugurated on the 17th of August 1982 as a museum of natural sciences, acquiring its current name on the 28th of March 1993.
The only museum in Romania dedicated to the life forms in the terrestrial waters and the seas and oceans of the world, containing a series of pieces considered by specialists as exceptions in the field.
The spiritual patron and organizer of the museum, Mihai Băcescu (1908-1999), was a world-class oceanologist (Romania’s largest specialist in this domain), participating in various scientific expeditions in the Caribbean Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Black Sea, Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. He personally brought hundreds of animals from the three oceans visited, which are today in the museum’s collections. The specimens in question come from 46 points around the globe – many from Mauritania, but also from Havana, Dakar, Cairo, Djibouti, the Gulf of Aden, Mount of Eskimos etc.
About 700 specimens collected by Nicolae Băcescu from his expeditions in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans are one-off showpieces: sea sponges, corals, pearl-producing shells, squid, lobsters, stars and sea urchins, sturgeons, venomous snakes, turtles, crocodiles.
The museum also exhibits a carriage unique in the world, made during 35 years only with the help of a knife by Leon Comnino, exhibited for the first time, in 1937, at the World’s Fair in Paris.
Another element of the top attraction is given by a geographical globe, unique in the world, because it was made by hand in the period 1982-1986 and shows, in addition to the relief of the land, the configuration of the underwater relief. The globe has a scale of 1:8,100,000, the scale of heights and depths being 1 cm = 2,000 meters.
