Day 16: Bucharest

This is very much a “travelogue style” post. If you're more interested in reading about cycling stuff then you can skip this and head on to the Danube Cycle Wrap Up post.

After sleeping the sleep of the dead — I really am a 400 threads per inch sheets kind of guy — I enjoyed a proper “hotel breakfast” complete with…an egg station! Despite being a 400 tpi sheets guy, I still consider an egg station the height of sophistication and class.

However, there was no time to langourously savour a freshly cooked omelette and high quality sourdough bread. I had a major European city to “do” and I had about 8 hours to do it.

First stop was the National Museum Of The History Of Romania because it was practically next door to the hotel. I had some great hopes for this museum and the façade certainly promised treasures within.

A promisingly classical look to this one.

I was to be sorely disappointed by this museum. I was first in the door and was directed to a confusing array of desks where a sour-faced attendant grudgingly relieved me of some money and I could explore the exhibits.

The entire museum was a giant shambolic mess of absolute rubbish. Here are some examples

Let's put a TV and a set of scales here. Why? Why not?

Cases and cases of creepy dolls.

What's a thing that's going to go well next to some stamps which were originally Hungarian but were over stamped by the Romanian government in 1921? I know, a Soviet high altitude jet helmet.

It was absolute madness. No rhyme or reason to any of the displays. Random photographs displayed on the wall next to a dog collar or a sword. However, there was one little exhibit which hinted at an interesting back story.

Some moon rock and a Romanian flag that's been to the moon. Thanks Tricky Dicky!

It is hard to read on the photograph but this incredibly small and light Romanian flag went to the moon and back on Apollo 11. Richard Nixon presented this plaque — with some tiny fragments of moon rock embedded in lucite — to the Romanian people. What's going on here? Why was an autocratic genocidal Stalinist dictator best chums with American presidents and British Governments in the 1970s and 1980s?

The answer lies in a canny geopolitical decision that Ceauçescu made in 1968. Always terrified of Soviet power and control, he decided to not support the Warsaw Pact when the tanks rolled into Prague. On the basis of “my enemy's enemy is my friend” the West fell over itself to make life easy for the Romanian Communist party. Romania joined the IMF, they got to borrow money and access to technology — including nuclear power — because…well…anybody who was hated by the Soviets surely was a good chap. It was convenient to ignore his eugenics policies in the name of realpolitik

The most bathetic example of this was when Nicolae and Elena Ceauçescu visited the UK in 1978. The story is well told in this Spectator article. But, for those of you who can't be bothered, the summary is that the Labour government was struggling with a tanking economy and was desperate to get trade moving. Ceauçescu was one of the “acceptable communists” and was also desperate to get trade with the West in order to keep blowing the money on gargantuan ego-driven projects. A state visit was arranged during which Callaghan would attempt to wheedle some timber or coal out of Romania in return for the plans for the Austin Montego or something. Elena insisted on staying at Buckingham Palace and also insisted on an academic honourary doctorate — she had form on this — which she actually received despite being illiterate. The Ceauçescus stole ashtrays and light fittings from Buckingham Palace and the Queen is said to have jumped into a hedge to hide from them when they were out walking in the palace gardens.

The museum's hot mess of badly signed and confusing exhibits led through the building towards the main event: The Column of Trajan. It's mentioned a lot. "Not long until Trajan's column!! Just round the corner is Trajan's column!!“ Wow, that's impressive” you might think until you realise that it's just plaster casts of the real one in Rome. I mean, I know Trajan is a bit of a founding father when it comes to Romania but…really? It is certainly not mentioned in any of the signs in English that this is a copy.

Like going to Madrid to see a poster of the Mona Lisa.

There was a strong room with more undifferentiated crap in it — ranging from Roman bracelets made out of copper to the famous Iron Crown that crowned all the kings of Romania.

Made from a melted down cannon of some enemy. Or maybe a fake? Dunno.

The story of the Romanian Royal Family is a particularly sad and tragic tale especially in the 20th century. The shy king Fernando, his beautiful British princess consort — who called him Nando (hehehe) — and, in a strong field, the biggest wastrel prince in Europe. No time or space to go into this now but, once again, I recommend Paul Kenyon's book.

Walking is the best way to see a city and I had a lot of walking to do through the streets of Bucharest. Every now and then, you get a glimpse of the faded Parisian elegance of the old town streets seen like something at the bottom of a swimming pool: shimmering and not quite tangible. Tree-lined and cobbled streets with an elegant townhouse amid the centrally planned monstrosities and ever present smell of bad drains.

Mostly everything outside the old town is adverts for betting shops, the betting shops themselves and fast food joints selling penis shaped food.

No comment

Walking in cities in the heat is about making sure you're always in the shade while keeping your eyes firmly on the pavement to avoid the ever present dog crap. This was possible in Bucharest until you came across “triumphal boulevards” like this one

Consciously modelled on Pyongyang after Ceauçescu's visit there. He bloody loved North Korea.

I was making my way across town towards a museum which I was very excited to see but on the way I had to stop in at this tiny little church.

Tucked away behind some ugly apartments and offices

This is one of the famous “moving churches” of Bucharest. During the demolition of the old town as part of the “systematisation” program resulting in the building of the Palace of the Parliament — which we shall be seeing later in this post — the communists demolished about 7 square kilometres of the centre of Bucharest, displacing 40,000 people into brutalist apartment blocks on the outskirts of the city. To save the churches in the area, an engineer called Eugeniu Iordăchescu designed a way to get the churches off their foundations and roll them away to safety on rail tracks. It is well worth reading this lovely story coming out of a terrible time.

I was heading to the Dimitri Leónida Technical Museum and, when you look at these photographs, I think you can imagine why. This description just heightened my already overwhelming desire to go and see it.

“The museum covers a wide range of topics related to engineering and the physical sciences, including 1960s nuclear power plant technology, gamma spectrometers, horse-powered oil extraction techniques, magnetic and electrical fields, chemistry, mining, telecommunications, and hydraulics. Reflecting some of the main engineering efforts of the 20th century, the museum features lots of different motorized carriages, motorbikes, and all kinds of crazy cars, from beefy antique German race cars to wacky Eastern Bloc vehicles to fabulous concept cars that never saw mass production.”

Anybody with even a fleeting understanding of me and the sorts of places I like to visit is going to realise that this is the crack-cocaine of museum visits and can understand why I was practically vibrating with excitement when I walked up to the door but…it was closed for the day. I can't be certain but I think I may have had to stifle a tiny but manly sob when I found out.

There was nothing to it. It was time to get to the main event. The Palace Of the Parliament — or House of the Republic or People's House depending on what era you're talking about. This is the truly enormous building that was the centrepiece of Ceauçescu's attempt to remodel Bucharest along the lines of Pyongyang.

Photographs to not do justice to the sheer immensity of this building

I really recommend clicking on the Wikipedia link above to dive into some of the details of this building but for those of you who can't be bothered, here's the summary.

As part of the systematisation programme of the Romanian Communist Party, Ceauçescu initiated “Project Budapest” to rebuild Budapest based on the “socialist realism” style (c.f. Pyongyang). There was a competition to design the main building and, unexpectedly, it was won by a 28 year old architect called Anca Petrescu. Building commenced in 1984 and the whole programme went as well as might be expected with a junior architect being directed by a megalomaniac control freak dictator. Scheduled to be completed in 2 years, despite using 5,000 soldiers and 40,000 slave labourers, it was still being constructed when Ceauçescu fell in December 1989.

Old Nicolae definitely wasn't the sharpest spoon in the drawer and he had difficulty understanding scale models and, as a result, it just got bigger and bigger.

Nicolae's venal and dangerous wife Elena — who was desperate to have her own cult of personality — also got involved. She wanted it to be in the “eclectic style" which, as so often, is a synonym for a flaming dumpster fire of architectural and design gaffs. For example, there are examples of Doric, Corinthian, Ionic and Tuscan columns on the outside.

The building is the heaviest in the world due to its construction out of over engineered steel/concrete/marble because Bucharest is in an earthquake zone — thanks for that African continental plate! It's the largest administrative building in Europe and not much smaller than the Pentagon.

It turns out that you have to book a tour 24 hours in advance but there was a spare place on an organised group tour leaving in an hour which I could have. The desire to see the inside of the building fought with my deep seated misanthropic aversion to doing things in organised groups. I wasn't going to come back to Bucharest any time soon so I swallowed my misanthropy and joined the group.

A minor corridor

It is impossible to convey the gargantuan scale of this building in photographs. Some of you may have been to the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi. That's a big building on the outside and has enormous interior spaces. It is absolutely dwarfed by this.

Those curtains are 40m long and weigh a quarter of a tonne each

The ballrooms and state rooms are also on some inhuman scale.

The main ball room is half the size of a football pitch

The insanity that led the leader of Romania to spend approximately $10bn in 2024 dollars on this while the country was literally starving is an unforgivable crime.

Everything had to be made from Romanian materials to satisfy Ceauçescu's infantile grasp of economics. Entire farms were converted to silk production in order to make the silk curtains which Elena insisted on. All in order that foreign leaders could be welcomed into rooms like this.

The classical style? The carpet weighs three tonnes.

Each of the main rooms has a different style as specified by Elena. French, classical, oriental and more. They're all there and, like the outside, the net result is a mess. I am in no way blaming the slave labourers but, as you might imagine, when you look at the details, everything is done very sloppily and, like old churches in the UK, the building struggles to cope with the demands of a modern building like lighting, air conditioning and data/telephone access. Duct-taped ethernet cables snake across floors and small data racks lurk with incongrous modernity in the corners of baroque marbled ballrooms.

The building has 1,100 rooms and six levels of basements with nuclear bunkers and a little James-Bond-villain-style train to get around. It's currently used for both houses of the Romanian Parliament and various other administrative functions. During my visit, we saw approximately 6% of the floor area and there's still 70% of it which is completely unused.

There's a certain squeamishness in Romania about talking about the fascist period in the 1930s until 1944 and the communist period until 1989. There was a holocaust inflicted on the Jewish, Roma and intellectual population in the first period and unthinkable human misery and avoidable deaths in the second period — unsurprisingly also disproportionally inflicted on the same groups. Given that a fair number of people alive today were complicit in the outrages of the Ceauçescu era, maybe that squeamishness is understandable. No country's history is a clean history but I felt I needed an antidote to the People's Palace.

On my way back to the hotel I stopped in at the Museum of Communism in the old-town restaurant quarter. A tiny red door sandwiched between a sex club and a bar offering “all night parties, €1 shots, tits!” was the entrance to this exquisite little museum.

It's two floors in a tiny town house and it probably has less than one hundredth of the area of The National Museum but it packs a much much stronger punch. Extensive information in Romanian, English and Spanish details both the horrors and the everyday humiliations that Romanians suffered.

The Securitatea were the feared secret police.

Displays of a typical kitchen or living room in one of the socialist era apartments are poignant and sad.

Beautifully done. And you can sit down and play with the exhibits.

Little vignettes about sport, transport, electricity, the electronics industry — yes, they had one before Ceauçescu crashed the economy — are powerfully done in a detailed and informative way. Little throw-away sentences have a strange visceral impact. For example, the Dacia 1100 (a knock off Renaut 8) cost 30 times the annual salary in 1980 and had a 5 year waiting list. Who presides of a system that produces, frankly really shitty, cars with a 5 year waiting list that cost many multiples of the annual salary and thinks…”yeah, this is the best system”. Or indeed a country which exports all its food while the population is literally starving in the streets.

Due to “external debt” pressures — basically the communists borrowing way too much money and blowing it on stupid projects like the Transfăgărășan highway— meant that there was rationing in Romania for 20 years. Or, in a classic piece of communist double speak…”The Scientific Food Programme”.

My horror and fascination at all this is because it was all happening when I was at school and university and flirting with left wing ideas. What could possibly go wrong if clever people plan an economy and give services and products to the population according to their need? It turns out starvation is one thing and forced labour camps are another.

This display was very poignant.

Nadia Comāneci was a hero until she defected. Then she was airbrushed from history.

I loved this museum although it didn't make up for the Dimitri Leónida Technical Museum being closed, nothing could do that. If you're ever in Bucharest, please go and see this museum. I tried to buy a t-shirt to support them but they only had them in XS and, although I've “left some weight on the road” on this trip, I didn't think it would really look good. I just gave them the money anyway.

After eight hours walking and being a tourist, I headed in the hyper-touristy section of the Old Town to eat Turkish food and drink surprisingly good rosado. It was a good day. I had the joy of seeing this weather forecast on the TV in the restaurant — yes, it's that type of place — and I was so glad I was not cycling any more.

That band of “Disconfort Termic” are the bits I cycled through.

No more Disconfort Termic for me!

With that, I'd “done” Bucharest or, at least, a good amount of things in a day. Did I like the city? Yes, in a way. It's got some deep character even after being comprehensively destroyed in the 1970s and 1980s but maybe the scars of that destruction are too salient. It would have been nice to see it in its heyday in the 1920s when it was known as “Little Paris”.

The city today feels oddly underpopulated. Maybe it's the scale of the Ceauçescu era buildings and roads but even in what is left of the old town there don't seem to be enough cars and people for the size of the city. The population has fallen from its peak of 2.2 million in 1992 and it's still a city of 1.7m people but it has a strange emptiness.

Would I come back? Probably, if only for the Dimitri Leonida Technical Museum and there's an old derelict chemical plant 6km out of the city which is supposed to be a wild experience.

There's a “wrap up” blog post about the whole ride which you can read if you're more interested in the cycling stuff than the tourism and searing social commentary.

We're done here.