Photo: Mihail Neagu
If Jonathan Swift had lived in our times instead of three centuries ago, I would have most likely kidnapped and maybe even tortured him in order to rewrite the first part of his Gulliver's Travels'.
Originally titled as “Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships”, Jonathan Swifts satyric fantasy novel was the first thing that popped into my mind after entering a room filled with no less than... wait for it... just a little bit more... 214 (two hundred fourteen) Mercedes-Benz, Maybach and smart cars.
No, I hadn't entered a sheik's air-conditioned garage somewhere in Dubai but a man's most treasured room of the house, where each and every decade of the long Mercedes-Benz history is represented by tens of models from the respective era.
Their owner's name is Mihail Neagu, and he is obsessed with two things. Actually three, come to think of it, but we will leave the third for a later interview.
Ever since he was a child, he has been in love with the three-pointed star and everything it relates with. So much in love, in fact, that he vowed to someday own every single model ever made by the Stuttgart brand.
Some twenty years later, almost all of them are parked nicely inside his house, and he was kind enough to let us pay him a visit and in turn become forever mesmerized by the collection.
In case it's not obvious by now, we are talking about scale models of Mercedes-Benz, Maybach and smart cars, as not even the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart has so many cars in one place.
You can find almost anything in Mihail's collection, from different models of the original Unimog 401 to every Mercedes-Benz DTM car or the legendary Silberpfeile (Silver Arrows) of the 1930s.
He even has a scale model of the Daimler Reitwagen, otherwise known as the world's first motorcycle, which was designed by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach without knowing that a tiny version of it will be admired among hundreds of its four-wheeled successors in a room at the base of the Carpathian Mountains some 129 years later.
You don't even have to be a Mercedes-Benz fan to appreciate to a high degree Mihail's lifelong passion, especially since he is rather picky about the quality of its miniatures and most of them look pretty much identical to the real deal if you squint your eyes a bit. Just for a tiny bit in the case of the highly-detailed models made by CMC, for example.
Most of them look so real that some of the dioramas that Mihail Neagu creates could be easily mistaken for photos of real, full-size cars in real, full-size settings.
Naturally, a life-like cars miniature diorama wouldn't be complete without lilliputian people doing the driving or other car-related activities around the models.
This is where Mihail's other passion comes in, as he not only collects scale model cars and builds miniature dioramas but he is also creating his own miniature famous people, becoming something like a real-life and somewhat spookier version of Jonathan Swift's Lemuel Gulliver character.
Some of the miniature people in the adjacent photos were bought, but most of the Mercedes-Benz and racing-related lilliputians were actually created from the ground up (well, not that high up, considering) by himself.
Who else can boast about giving orders to Ferdinand Porsche, Juan Manuel Fangio or Stirling Moss and make them stand completely still near or inside a Mercedes-Benz icon from the past?
The attention to detail in some of them is almost as jaw-dropping as the one seen in some of his more expensive Mercedes-Benz scale models. Wristwatches sculpted on the right hand instead of the left for the sake of historic accuracy or racing goggles painstakingly cut from minuscule sheets of balloons are something that only a watchmaker with OCD could probably pull off as good as he does.
If the small share of adjacent images and photo gallery bellow has only made you crave for more, Mihail Neagu has a ton of others on his collection's Facebook page, which he constantly updates with new car-related dioramas that comprise his own three-pointed star scale models or others.
You might want to stay tuned on autoevolution for an upcoming interview with the mad man behind the mad scale model collection and also have a more in-depth look at his own miniature works, be them racing characters, miniature dioramas or bespoke scale models of truck trailers.
No, I hadn't entered a sheik's air-conditioned garage somewhere in Dubai but a man's most treasured room of the house, where each and every decade of the long Mercedes-Benz history is represented by tens of models from the respective era.
Their owner's name is Mihail Neagu, and he is obsessed with two things. Actually three, come to think of it, but we will leave the third for a later interview.
Some twenty years later, almost all of them are parked nicely inside his house, and he was kind enough to let us pay him a visit and in turn become forever mesmerized by the collection.
In case it's not obvious by now, we are talking about scale models of Mercedes-Benz, Maybach and smart cars, as not even the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart has so many cars in one place.
You can find almost anything in Mihail's collection, from different models of the original Unimog 401 to every Mercedes-Benz DTM car or the legendary Silberpfeile (Silver Arrows) of the 1930s.
You don't even have to be a Mercedes-Benz fan to appreciate to a high degree Mihail's lifelong passion, especially since he is rather picky about the quality of its miniatures and most of them look pretty much identical to the real deal if you squint your eyes a bit. Just for a tiny bit in the case of the highly-detailed models made by CMC, for example.
Most of them look so real that some of the dioramas that Mihail Neagu creates could be easily mistaken for photos of real, full-size cars in real, full-size settings.
This is where Mihail's other passion comes in, as he not only collects scale model cars and builds miniature dioramas but he is also creating his own miniature famous people, becoming something like a real-life and somewhat spookier version of Jonathan Swift's Lemuel Gulliver character.
Some of the miniature people in the adjacent photos were bought, but most of the Mercedes-Benz and racing-related lilliputians were actually created from the ground up (well, not that high up, considering) by himself.
Who else can boast about giving orders to Ferdinand Porsche, Juan Manuel Fangio or Stirling Moss and make them stand completely still near or inside a Mercedes-Benz icon from the past?
If the small share of adjacent images and photo gallery bellow has only made you crave for more, Mihail Neagu has a ton of others on his collection's Facebook page, which he constantly updates with new car-related dioramas that comprise his own three-pointed star scale models or others.
You might want to stay tuned on autoevolution for an upcoming interview with the mad man behind the mad scale model collection and also have a more in-depth look at his own miniature works, be them racing characters, miniature dioramas or bespoke scale models of truck trailers.
Google News