It’s not every day that you get to sit at a bar drinking with the ghosts of spies long-dead and conspiracies long-confounded. And yet, that is what you can do if you stop for a nightcap at the The English Pub in Bucharest.

It forms part of the Hilton hotel so it may seem like a touristy sort of place, but its history lends it a certain charm.

Some sources indicate that Bucharest, and the English Pub in particular, was ‘arguably Europe’s most notorious den of spies in the years leading up to World War II’. The current owner plays up to this reputation; the current decor is still as it was described in London’s Daily Express in 1938: “heavily ornate furnishings, marble and gold pillars, great glittering chandeliers, and the deep settees placed well back in the recesses of the lounge as if inviting conspiracy.”

Notoriously frequented by both Gestapo and British spies back in the day, the Communist regime nationalised the hotel after the war. The renovation that then took place included bugging every room, tapping all the phones and intercepting all calls from all pay phones within a half mile too. Even the ashtrays were said to have secret microphones planted in them. To make sure that these efforts would not be thwarted, all the hotel staff were informers. Local lore has it that the doormen performed covert surveillance of the comings and goings of visitors while all documents and property of guests would be secretly photographed by agents posing as housekeeping staff. To top it all off, the director of the hotel was a colonel in the directorate of counterespionage in  Romania’s Directia Informatii Externe (DIE) which was the external intelligence organisation and therefore the equivalent of MI6.

This was a time when common knowledge has it that 1 in 4 people in Romania somehow worked for the state’s intelligence apparatus. It was a running joke that in any family of four, they would wonder which one of them it was.

Today, the place is a classy bar serving drinks that are clearly priced for tourists rather than locals. It is a pleasant way to unwind after a day in the sweltering heat and is certainly the sort of place you can easily find yourself returning to.

But you will be disappointed if you’re expecting anyone to lean close to you and whisper, “Wax the purple donkey!”