The General Henri Mathias Berthelot House (Casa General Henri Mathias Berthelot) is an early 20th-century historic residence in the Copou district of Iași. Originally the home of Professor George Bogdan, it became the wartime residence of French general Henri Mathias Berthelot, who stayed here while leading the French Military Mission in Romania during the First World War.
Berthelot arrived in Romania in the autumn of 1916, when the Romanian army had suffered major defeats and much of the government and administration had retreated to Iași. His mission brought French officers, doctors, pilots, and other specialists to help reorganize, equip, and train the Romanian forces. The work carried out during the winter and spring contributed to the army’s recovery before the battles of Mărăști, Mărășești, and Oituz in the summer of 1917. During this period Berthelot was accommodated in Bogdan’s house, then on Strada 40 de Sfinți. A marble plaque on the façade commemorates his stay in 1916-1917, and the street was later renamed after him.
The house was built in an eclectic style dominated by Baroque decoration, with Neoclassical elements incorporated into the façade. Its most elaborate section is the central entrance bay, where a broad staircase rises to a balustraded terrace beneath sculpted ornament and a tall upper window set into the mansard roof. Round dormer windows, pilasters, molded surrounds, and the steep roof give the relatively low building a much more monumental appearance than its scale suggests.
After the war the building passed through several different uses, including offices of the railways, before its interior was divided into apartments in the 1960s and later used for social housing. Decades of alteration and deterioration were followed by a major restoration in the 2020s, which consolidated the structure and recovered the richly decorated exterior.
