Bucharest, Romania

Bucharest, Romania

The new arrival to Bucharest is immediately barraged with a cacophony of horns, tyre screeches, engines over-revving and distant paramedics’ sirens as the world’s worst drivers begin a new day of terrorising those who wish to see another day. The unholy sights and sounds of the Romanian capital were a very rude awakening, almost literally, on a warm and sunny midweek morning in late September. The last thing I could remember was falling asleep just after witnessing a splendid sunrise from the northern bank of the Danube following an hour’s wait at one of just two bridges that cross that great river on the Romanian-Bulgarian border. I slumbered softly until my bus pulled up on the edge of Bucharest and I was unceremoniously dumped out of it after all the conscious passengers had already left of their own accord.

It must have been almost 0800 but I was bleary eyed as I began a walk of indeterminate length to find my accommodation and deposit my bag. I had chosen my hostel specifically because of its proximity to Bucharest’s Gara de Nord, from which I planned to take a train the next morning through the mountains to Brașov. I had also been due to travel from Sofia to Bucharest by train, but having altered my plans, I had overlooked the fact that I had no idea whereabouts in the Romanian capital I would be dropped off. Not knowing my way around, I faced a lengthy walk, and within the first five minutes, an impatient lorry driver and an egotistical maniac in a saloon car had each made a fairly successful attempt on my life. I would have to careful. Bucharest’s drivers take no prisoners. Heaving the shoulder strap of my bag higher, I set myself up with a good pace and pushed on, humming to myself in a futile attempt to block out the sounds of angry motorists and minor traffic collisions. ‘Welcome to Romania,’ I thought.

The Dâmbovița river, Bucharest

Bucharest is huge. It’s the sixth biggest city in the European Union (after London, Berlin, Madrid, Rome and Paris), and it shows. Unlike all the other places I had visited in southeastern Europe, it is not walkable. I am an enthusiast for shunning public transport and getting about on foot, but I had covered just a small segment of the city’s central area in slightly over an hour. I wasn’t planning on heading outside the centre anyway, but if and when I did, I would certainly need to take the metro or a bus. Road users and distance aside, my brisk early morning walk was fine, taking me through the centre and past the indescribably large Palace of the Parliament (Palatul Parlamentului), one of the world’s largest buildings. I would return later in the day; it is Bucharest’s most iconic landmark and the apotheosis of the excesses of the Ceaușescu regime.

After finally reaching my hostel and checking in, I was advised to walk back to the centre because the nearest metro station was too far out of the way and the buses were described as a little complicated. Besides, if I headed in the right direction, it wouldn’t be long before I reached Calea Victoriei, one of the city’s principal streets, named after the Romanian victory over the Ottoman Empire in the war that resulted in independence in 1878. There, many of Bucharest’s main institutions are located, and the street is particularly formal for the city. Many of the buildings are elegantly built in baroque or neoclassical styles, reminiscent of the great cities of Central Europe, and totally unlike the Stalinist architecture of much of Bucharest. At the turn of the 20^th century, the city was known as ‘Micul Paris’ – ‘Little Paris’. Calea Victoriei and its sophisticated buildings were at the heart of a period of inspiration in which Romania tried to model itself upon France and its high culture. The most visible French-inspired structure is Arcul de Triomf, built in 1936 as the successor to an 1878 original. Part of this transition towards the Western European cultural sphere saw Romania abandon the Cyrillic alphabet and replace it with the Latin script in 1862. To date, it is the only majority Orthodox Christian country to use the Latin alphabet. Cyrillic was reintroduced in Moldova, which speaks Romanian, during its life as one of the fifteen Soviet republics.

The Palace of the National Military Circle (Cercul Militar Național), on Calea Victoriei

Arcul de Triomf

Opposite the CEC Palace, home to Romania’s last state-owned bank, is the National Museum of Romanian History, and on its steps, a contentious recent statue that is supposed to embody several of the contrasting components of Romanian identity. Unveiled in 2012, it features a slightly larger than life size nude figure of the Roman emperor Trajan holding in his arms the she-wolf of Rome, whose head is attached to a cylindrical protrusion supposedly representing the Dacian Draco, a limbless dragon that adorned the Dacian tribe’s war banners. It has been panned and parodied by the local people, who have taken to photographing themselves holding their own pets in front of the statue, and prompted suggestions that it is in fact a tribute to Bucharest’s stray dogs. I for one cannot say I have the inside experience to cast a conclusive judgement on it, but I will say that it is quite a surreal attempt to summarise the complexities of a diverse country’s history in one simple statue, and that its ambition is probably further-reaching than its artistic merits.

The CEC Palace, another of Bucharest's French-inspired buildings

The statue of Trajan, the Capitoline Wolf and the Dacian Draco, National Museum of Romanian History
(Muzeul Național de Istorie a României)

The city's original Capitoline Wolf, donated by Italy in 1921, Piața Roma

The adjacent old town is home to a few surviving indicators of Bucharest’s past, including the restaurant Hanu’ lui Manac, situated within a wooden building surrounding a central courtyard, a former travellers’ inn serving the roads between the mountains to the north and the Danube to the south. Nearby is the Stavropoleos Monastery (Mănăstirea Stavropoleos), a surviving 18^th century church and a later building housing a significant collection of art retrieved from churches that were demolished by Ceaușescu – more on this to come – which together form an active nunnery. Also worth a mention is the city’s oldest surviving church that remains in its original location, the Church of St Anthony (Biserica Sfântul Antonie).

The wooden structure of Hanu' lui Manac makes it an attractive feature of the old town

The courtyard of the Stavropoleos Monastery (Mănăstirea Stavropoleos)

The monastery's church is finely decorated

The Church of St Anthony (Biserica Sfântul Antonie), built in 1554

Vlad III Țepeș, 'Dracula'. The dates (1456-1462) refer to his longest period of rule as prince of Wallachia. Behind are some of the remains of Curtea Veche

The latter is part of a complex called Curtea Veche, or the Old Court, built in the centre of the city in the middle ages. Bucharest (called București in Romanian) was mythically founded in time immemorial by a shepherd named Bucur. Another story links the city’s name with the word bucurie, meaning ‘joy’. Neither of these possibilities are verifiably true, and the city’s first reference is in 1459, at the time of Curtea Veche’s construction. Bucharest was then part of the principality of Wallachia and grew to prominence through its status as the royal residence of its prince, Vlad III. Better known locally as Vlad Țepeș and in English as Vlad the Impaler, he is arguably the most famous Romanian of all time, and certainly the least understood. This is all thanks to an Irish writer by the name of Bram Stoker, who never visited Romania and combined the legends of Vlad’s ruthless tortures of his enemies with European folk tales of vampires to concoct his masterpiece of gothic horror, Dracula.

Vlad III was born in Transylvania, but ruled in neighbouring Wallachia; the association of the former region with the character of a sadistic bloodsucking vampire prince was an invention of Stoker’s. The flat and open countryside of Wallachia would hardly be as haunting a place for his book’s sinister events as the high mountains, caves and misty forests of Transylvania. In reality, Vlad was an important bastion of European Christianity against incursions by Ottoman Turks, although he was at times on the same side as the Turks when it suited him to be. His habit of impaling people is based upon contemporary historical sources, from the Turks and also from Hungarians and Transylvanian Saxons whom he executed using this method. Among those I spoke to, his legacy isn’t that of a brutal and merciless mutilator, but of a just leader who went to the most extreme lengths to deter criminals, who knew what they would receive for their robbing, raping and murdering. His land was allegedly the safest in Europe under his rule, and those who left purses of gold on the streets would find them again days later, since Vlad’s citizens were too afraid of potential impalement to dare to touch money that wasn’t theirs. Curtea Veche is the surviving remnant of Vlad III’s palace, intended to enable him to guard the Danube and southern Wallachia from the Turks to the south, protecting the capital, which at the time was 50 miles to the northwest, at Târgoviște.

Bucharest's old town

This sign in the old town warns that this building is likely to collapse in the event of an earthquake 

Five minutes south of the old town, at the heart of Bucharest, is Piața Unirii. Here, the narrow Dâmbovița river is diverted briefly underground to pass beneath the square’s park, and the east-west Bulevardul Unirii, which leads up to the front of the Palace of the Parliament. The street alone is whopping. 3,500 metres long and 92 wide, it is Bucharest’s answer to Paris’ glamorous Champs-Élysées, deliberately built marginally wider and significantly longer than its French equivalent. Originally called Bulevardul Victoria Socialismului (Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism), it was born out of the need to rebuild parts of the capital following a devastating earthquake in 1977; the Carpathians of central Romania, it turns out, are one of the more seismically active parts of Europe. Ceaușescu seized upon this opportunity to extensively redesign the city by incorporating massive projects of demolition and urban planning within the efforts to clear the damage.

Piața Unirii

Stalinist blocks line Bulevardul Unirii

Bulevardul Unirii, Bucharest's answer to the Champs-Élysées, seen from the Palace of the Parliament

His inspiration? North Korea. A 1971 visit to Pyongyang had inspired the communist leader to enact a programme known as ‘Systematisation’, intended to greatly increase the proportion of the urban population and build towards a future society of fully-developed socialism. The result is ghastly. Entire downtown neighbourhoods were destroyed and their residents relocated to less prime spots on the city’s outskirts. Twenty-two churches were also knocked down, although thanks to the engineer Eugeniu Iordăchescu, a dozen others were saved. Iordăchescu took inspiration from seeing a waiter holding a tray of drinks, and began to wonder how he could create ‘trays’ to transport large buildings and thereby save Bucharest’s wealth of old churches. Under his initiative, depressions were excavated beneath these buildings, allowing them to be loaded onto rails and moved up to a few hundred metres. This makes Bucharest particularly unusual, as in many cases churches dating back to the middle ages are nowadays situated in their original condition but a block or two from where they had stood through the centuries.

Nicolae Ceaușescu, his cult of personality, and the tumultuous conclusion of his regime, which saw him shot by firing squad in Târgoviște, was a pet project of mine at the age of seventeen. Inspired by a piece I read detailing the short period of civil unrest in December 1989, I wanted to investigate why it was that unlike East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria, the Romanian Revolution turned violent and culminated in the execution of their leader. Back then, I was clueless as to how to write a proper academic history (a situation that three years of university didn’t seem to change!) and no doubt the resulting essay wasn’t particularly good. In the ensuing years, most of the specific facts I had picked up about Ceaușescu had been lost, but I have retained a lingering interest in him and his rule in Romania.

The poorly educated son of a peasant farmer, Ceaușescu became a communist as a teenager and spend time in prison in the 1930s and in internment camps in the 1940s, when Romania was an ally of Nazi Germany. A popular anecdote tells of how his frequently drunk father named another of his sons Nicolae because he couldn’t remember that he already had a Nicolae. In 1946, aged 28, he married Elena Petrescu, two years his senior. She was similarly badly educated, having left school with positive grades in only singing and needlework. She overcame this deficiency to establish herself as a notable researcher in chemistry, submitting research that was suspiciously similar to the work of established chemists. However, she was a forceful personality, arguably more so than her husband, and was constantly behind her husband, henpecking and trying to shape his decisions. By the time of their collapse, she was every bit as hated as her husband. The soldiers that executed the pair were ordered not to shoot Nicolae in the face, for identification purposes. No such order applied to Elena, and the firing squad didn’t refrain from aiming for her head.

After a succession of roles in the first two decades of communist rule in Romania, Ceaușescu became the party chairman in 1965 and the head of state in 1967. Inspired by the example of those ancient inhabitants of Romania, the Dacian tribe, and their defiance of the Roman Empire, Ceaușescu pursued an independent foreign policy that challenged the USSR’s influence over his country. This made him a popular figure in the West, in a similar way to their support for the Yugoslavian leader Tito, but he was a dreadful ruler at home. The zenith of his tenure was in 1968, when he refused to commit troops to the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact’s quashing of the Prague Spring in the Czechoslovak capital. He argued that the countries of the Soviet bloc should be able to forge their own destinies with relative freedom from the USSR. He likewise didn’t comply with the communist boycott of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

He adopted the moniker of the Conducător – ‘the leader’ – and felt it was his destiny to transform Romania into a leading power of the world. In doing so, he tried to whitewash the country’s culture and forcibly urbanise the population, as already mentioned with his reorganisation of central Bucharest. All abortions were banned because a large and growing population was required to provide workers, leading to Romania having some of the most overcrowded orphanages in Europe. Inspired by high oil prices in the 1970s, due to the Arab embargo against the allies of Israel, Ceaușescu tried to become the principal supplier to the West. Romania had long had substantial oil resources, but the policy was enacted poorly and in the end, the oil was sold off at its lowest value.

By the mid-1980s, the situation was dire. Ceaușescu’s agricultural reforms involved a horse breeding programme, with beasts of burden taking over from tractors and mechanised production. He increasingly undertook a programme of austerity during his later years in order to pay off the country’s foreign debt. It was ultimately successful but it meant life was atrocious for most working people. Significant amounts of food from Romania’s fertile farms were exported, leaving poor quality produce for the locals. He introduced a strictly rationed ‘scientific diet’ for his people, which wasn’t lacking for quantity or nutrition, except that the quotas per capita were never achieved. 75% of Romania’s food was sold abroad, along with significant amounts of energy.

Fuel and electricity were routinely cut off. The formerly buzzing café culture and nightlife in Bucharest died; it was a far cry from ‘the Paris of the Balkans’. A leading cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning; people would light their stoves to keep warm in the winter, doze off due to exhaustion from overwork, during which time the gas supply would be turned off and the flame would die, only to asphyxiate the unfortunate people when the gas turned on again without a flame. The official records show that the temperatures in winter never fell below 10˚C, yet people regularly died of hypothermia. This was convenient, since the heating in factories and schools was legally required to be turned on when the temperature dropped below that point. It must have been the only place in the world where snow fell and icicles formed in double figures above zero.  

To achieve his ends, he created one of the most repressive states of the twentieth century. His Securitate secret police outdid the East German Stasi as the most successful in the Warsaw Pact. Virtually no dissident groups formed, unlike in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and very few people resisted. The population became convinced that as many as 1 in 4 people were informants.

The Palace of the Parliament (Palatul Parlamentului)

Inside the palace

The palace seen from an upstairs balcony

The crowning glory of Ceaușescu’s Romania is the Palace of the Parliament. It is still Bucharest’s most recognisable landmark, and it is monstrously sized. The Pentagon in Virginia is the only administrative building larger. It is the third largest building in terms of volume, after the Temple of the Feathered Serpent at Teotihuacan in Mexico, and NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center. Its 1,100 rooms occupy twelve floors. The visible components span 240 metres by 270, and its height is 84 metres. However, it is something of an iceberg, with eight levels underground and an extensive network of tunnels spreading out beneath the city. It is the world’s heaviest building and sinks by several millimetres each year. Moreover, it is the world’s most expensive building.

Ceaușescu planned it to house all major government institutions and was due to move in there but was overthrown before this could happen. It is a huge and hideous edifice, and may be fairly seen as a sickening testament to Ceaușescu and his repressive regime. Surely it should be demolished? In the early 1990s, during the transition to democracy, this option was seriously considered. However, after careful calculations were made, it was decided that completing the building’s interior furnishings would actually be less costly than razing it to the ground. It was eventually finished in 1997. Today it houses the Romanian parliament, but this in total only uses 30% of the rooms. The remainder just sits there.

The palace's grandiose interior

Its ballroom

A conference room

It was something of a dream come true to visit the palace and see in person the lavish excesses of the Romanian regime. Its exterior is simply imposing and obscenely large, rather than having aesthetic merits as such. To get a decent view of the entire thing, one has to stand much too far away to appreciate any details. The inside, on the other hand, is marvellous. The planning was done meticulously, with specific types of stone and wood used for certain rooms, based upon both symbolism and functionality. The extensive heating system is carefully hidden behind a series of ornamental grilles, for instance, whilst pink carpets were used for a room intended for agreement signing, as pink is supposed to be a neutral colour.

An ideological painting by Nicolae Ceaușescu's favourite artist, Sabin Bălașa

Testaments to Romanian history are prevalent, including this statue of Stefan cel Mare - Stephen the Great - prince of Moldavia from 1457 to 1504

Alexandru Ioan Cuza, domnitor (ruler) of Romania from 1862 to 1866ș the artwork behind him shows Romanians fighting the Turks

The Ceaușescus’ contribution was to create a logistical nightmare for chief architect Anca Petrescu, who was just 28 when she won the contest to design the building. They regularly inspected the project and frequently changed their minds about minute details, leading to a series of reassessments about colours, styles and materials used. Everything within the building was from Romania. Entire factories were constructed to make one or two individual components for this building alone, to avoid importing even screws or light bulbs. The sole exception is a set of wooden doors in one room, which came from Zaïre (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), and Ceaușescu’s friend and fellow dictator, Mobutu Sese Soko.

A beautifully designed ceiling

Eye-catching carpet patterns

I couldn’t help but be impressed, and yet rather ambivalent too. The appalling living conditions of most Romanians, the poverty, the suffering caused by exporting almost all food and power, the fear induced by the ubiquitous secret police, all overshadowed the luxury and ostentatiousness of what I saw inside. How could I marvel at this cathedral of opulence without reflecting upon the delusions of its overseer, a man who cared more about whether he had Doric or Ionic columns than whether his people had meat in their kitchens and electricity in their walls?

The original name of the building was the Palace of the People, and my only hope for the undoing of Ceaușescu’s legacy is that it actually becomes a palace for the people. Given how little of it is used by the parliament, it would make sense to relocate the politicians to a more appropriately sized building. Many would argue that it should be kept as it is because it is a very tangible reminder of the country’s recent history. Others have suggested converting it into a shopping centre. Currently, it is still something of a retreat for Romanian politicians, concealed in their offices on this low hill, albeit for democratically elected figures, rather than a legion of unopposed communists. It is sometimes used for non-official purposes; the gymnast star who achieved a perfect score on the uneven bars at the 1976 Olympics, Nadia Comăneci, got married here in 1996. On the day of my visit, a band was rehearsing for an event, and it was an odd sensation to hear Queen’s Crazy Little Thing Called Love being played within the palace. Mostly, though, it is used for state functions and diplomatic purposes. I feel it should be open for the people, for free. However, its future is for the Romanian people, not me, to decide, and I am sceptical that anything will change.

Everything inside was large and strikingly designed

The palace's internal courtyard

Here I heard a band playing music by Queen

Piața Constituției and Bulevardul Unirii seen from the palace roof

The new Romanian People's Salvation Cathedral (Catedrala Mântuirii Neamului Românesc) is under construction just west of the palace. Based on an idea for a national cathedral that has existed since independence in 1878, the new building will be the world's tallest Orthodox cathedral, and one of the largest

The view northwest from the palace roof features Parcul Izvor in the foreground

Another Stalinist edifice is the spire-topped House of the Free Press (Casa Presei Libere), built in 1956 in the north of the city

By the time I left the palace, it was late afternoon and there was one more place I wanted to see in the remaining daylight before I went to find food. Back on Calea Victoriei is Piața Revoluției, the square in which Ceaușescu gave his final speech on 21 December 1989. As its name suggests, Piața Revoluției is intrinsically linked with the revolution. Five days earlier, in Timișoara, the regime had tried to evict a popular ethnically Hungarian priest, László Tőkés. Timișoara lies close to the border and has a sizeable Hungarian population, and unlike previous occasions, triggered a workers’ uprising. Speaking in this square to subdue the protests and offer meagre concessions, Ceaușescu had workers brought in and made to support his dull words of conciliation – he wasn’t an inspiring orator – but even with the threat of the Securitate presence, many refused. A chant of ‘Ti-mi-șoa-ra’ grew and grew, to the stage that it drowned out Ceaușescu’s words and his guards grew concerned and escorted their leader inside.

The following day, the army switched sides and began arming civilians. The ensuing revolution pitched these groups against the secret police and loyalists to the regime. Over 1,000 people were killed. On the 22^nd, the Ceaușescus fled Bucharest by helicopter, hoping to exile themselves to Iran or North Korea. An hour outside the capital, they were captured. On Christmas Day, a two hour trial in a kangaroo court resulted in the death sentence and the shootings of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu. The balcony of the Central Committee building from where he spoke on that fateful day still exists on what is now the Ministry of Internal Affairs. A monument to those who fought the regime in the revolution is now the square’s centrepiece.

The Central University Library building and an equestrian statue of King Carol I, Piața Revoluției

The Central Committee building from which Ceaușescu last addressed the world on 21 December 1989; the balcony is low down, just above the door

The Memorial of Rebirth (Memorialul Renașterii), Piața Revoluției

A poster of Ceaușescu on a kiosk. The caption totul e minunat means 'everything is great'

The distinctive shape of a little Orthodox church stood out in the dusk light

I was determined not to deal with more dark history, and having seen all that I really wanted to in Bucharest, I went to eat. Romanian cuisine is hardly acclaimed, but I will delve into it a little further in Brașov. In the capital, I had a tasty meal of mici (similar to small sausages) and mămăligă, Romania’s traditional corn flour dish. This was followed by what I must say is the most glorious and excessive pudding I have encountered anywhere. I would eat papanași daily, were it not so rich and sickly and served in such generous portions that to consume a whole thing requires superhuman efforts. The best way of describing it is to imagine a large, warm and well-made ring doughnut (though Romanians will insist that the preparation is different enough to make a distinction) filled with cream or cream cheese, then topped with dollops of thick fruit jam, and finally capped with an additional meatball-sized lump of dough and sprinkled with icing sugar. Just looking at it can cause diabetes. A normal portion consists of two. The first went down without a problem, although I was already struggling by the end. I surged on through the second thinking speed would be my friend, but was soon plodding again. I really wanted to finish it, but my internal organs were on their knees begging for mercy. My viscous arteries were slowly circulating fruity cream around my body as the fork fell gently from my hand and the surviving quarter of the dish laughed back at me. Papanași had defeated me.

Papanași

Piața Unirii was less of an eyesore by night, when the hideous Stalinist buildings were not so visible

I was to have another crack at conquering this sumptuous, oversized pudding the following night in Brașov. I was greatly looking forward to leaving this metropolis behind, not because of its truly abysmal motorists or its dearth of the kind of charms that had so endeared Sofia and Sarajevo to me. Instead, I was being called by the mountains and I couldn’t wait to spend a couple of days in the Carpathians. As I staggered back to my hostel, several kilograms heavier than normal and dodging being run over by several drivers who launched themselves through red lights at twice the speed limit, I reflected upon how totally ill-fitting central Bucharest is. All the character that its Calea Victoriei had been imbued with, all the charm that pervaded Cluj and the other parts of Romania I was yet to visit, had been purged by one man’s mission to remodel a city with a proud history, stretching back to Vlad the Impaler, after Pyongyang. Where Bucharest should have had a soul, there was a hollow chasm. I had three more days in Romania, and I knew they would reveal better places than this.

The Palace of the Parliament, still every bit as foreboding when illuminated by night