The Palms House: A Winter Garden in Timișoara
In the Iosefin district of Timișoara, a private house built for a timber contractor once contained a glass-roofed winter garden with two Canary Island date palms. The palms were cut down in 1951. The house still stands, but the winter garden is now divided into flats.
The Palms House stands on a side street in the Iosefin district, a part of the city where the grid frays into workshops and warehouses. It is not a palace. It is not a public institution. It is a private house, built for a family that made its money from timber and tile, and it contains, inside its walls, a glass-roofed winter garden that once held palms tall enough to touch the ridge. The house is now divided into flats. The palms are gone. What remains is a shell of yellow brick, a few iron columns, and the kind of silence that collects in buildings that have outlived their purpose but not their address.
The house was built between 1896 and 1898 for Antal Weisz, a contractor who had supplied sleepers for the railway line to Arad and roof tiles for half the factories in the outer districts. Weisz was not an architect. He was a man who knew what things cost. He bought the plot cheaply because it backed onto a tannery, and he hired a city engineer named Károly Molnár to draw up something that would announce, without shouting, that the Weisz family had arrived. The plans, held in the Timișoara branch of the National Archives, show a two-storey house with a central courtyard open to the south, covered at first-floor level by a glass and iron roof. The courtyard was to be the winter garden.
The glass roof was made by the same workshop that glazed the roof of the Neptune Baths, a few streets away. It consisted of 240 panes held in a grid of wrought iron, each pane a hand-blown cylinder cut flat and set in putty. The ironwork was painted a dull green, the same green used on the city's tram shelters. Beneath this roof, Weisz planted palms. Not the hardy windmill palms that survive in sheltered gardens today, but two Canary Island date palms, Phoenix canariensis, ordered from a nursery in Trieste and shipped up the Danube on a barge that also carried olive oil and dried figs.
The Palms That Touched The Glass
The palms arrived in the spring of 1899, each in a half-barrel of earth, their fronds cut back to the bud. They were carried into the winter garden through a double door that was later bricked up. A local gardener named János Kovács was hired to tend them, and his diary, kept in a private collection in Szeged, records their progress. By 1905 the taller palm had reached the glass. By 1910 it had to be checked by a metal collar that kept its crown from pushing through the panes. The diary notes that Kovács climbed a ladder every August to wipe dust from the leaves with a sponge and rainwater. He was paid four crowns a month for the palms and two for the rest of the garden.
The palms were not the only plants. The winter garden held a lemon tree, a clump of bamboo, and a bed of scented geraniums that Weisz's wife, Gizella, used to flavour sugar for cakes. There was a small fountain, gravity-fed from a cistern under the courtyard, with a lead pipe that froze every January and had to be thawed with hot bricks. The space was used for family lunches in winter, for drying laundry in wet weather, and for the kind of quiet that a house with six children rarely otherwise afforded. It was, in the words of a granddaughter interviewed in 1989, 'the only room where you could hear yourself think'.
Antal Weisz died in 1913. Gizella stayed in the house until 1921, when she sold it to the local branch of the Agricultural Credit Bank. The bank used the ground floor for offices and let the upper floor to a series of tenants. The palms remained. A photograph from 1925 shows the winter garden with a secretary's desk pushed against the fountain and a stack of ledgers on a chair where the lemon tree had stood. The palms, by then too tall to move, were simply left where they were. The bank's manager, a man named Bela Farkas, wrote to the head office in Budapest asking whether the palms could be sold. He received no reply.
The palms were not sold. They were simply left, and they grew until they could grow no more.
In 1948 the bank was nationalised. The house became the property of the state, and the winter garden was converted into a workshop for a cooperative that made artificial flowers. The palms were cut down in 1951. A report from the cooperative's records, now in the Timiș County Archive, states that the two palms were removed because they blocked the light and their fronds interfered with the drying racks. The wood was used for fuel. The iron roof was left in place, but several panes were broken during the removal and replaced with corrugated plastic. The fountain was filled with cement and used as a base for a cutting machine.
What The Building Is Now
The Palms House is now a residential building with eight flats. The winter garden has been divided into three rooms by plasterboard partitions. The glass roof still exists, but it is no longer clear. The panes that remain are covered in a film of grime and moss, and the plastic replacements have yellowed. The iron columns are rusted at their bases. The fountain is gone, but the cistern beneath the floor still holds water after heavy rain, and one tenant reports that the floor in the former garden is always cold. The palms are remembered only in the name that neighbours use for the building, a name that appears on no official document.
The building is not listed as a historic monument. It falls under the general protection of the city's built heritage, which means that any structural change requires a permit, but the permit process is slow and enforcement is rare. In 2018 a tenant applied to replace the remaining glass panes with double-glazed units. The application was refused on the grounds that the roof contributed to the character of the district. The tenant appealed. The appeal was dismissed. The roof still leaks. A bucket stands in the hallway of the second-floor flat during rain.
The current owners, a family who bought the building in 2005, have tried to sell it twice. The first buyer withdrew after a survey found that the iron roof would need complete replacement at a cost of at least 80,000 lei. The second buyer, a developer, wanted to demolish the house and build a block of flats. The city refused demolition permission in 2019, citing the building's role in the street's architectural continuity. The family now rents the flats and does minimal maintenance. The roof over the former winter garden is patched with bitumen sheet. The palms are gone, but the name remains, and so does the glass roof, holding back the rain as best it can.
The Palm That Grew Sideways
One detail is often repeated by neighbours. In the 1930s, the smaller of the two palms, the one that had never reached the glass, began to grow sideways. Its trunk bent towards the south wall, as if seeking light that the glass roof no longer provided. A photograph from 1937 shows the trunk curving at a sharp angle, its crown pressed against the wall. The palm was eventually cut down with the other in 1951. But the curve of its trunk is still visible in the outline of the plasterboard partition that now divides the room, because the partition was built around the stump, which was left in place. The stump is gone now, but the partition still bulges slightly where it stood.
The Palms House is not a monument. It is not open to visitors. It is not mentioned in most guidebooks to Timișoara. It is a building that has been used and reused, and that now waits for someone to decide what to do with it. The palms are gone, but the winter garden remains, and so does the name. On a wet afternoon, if you stand in the courtyard and look up, you can see the iron grid against the sky, and if you know what was there, you can almost see the fronds. But you cannot see them. The glass is dirty. The palms are gone. The house is still standing.