Throw into most pub quizzes the question of the location of Europe’s biggest building, and it would be a reasonable bet that most punters in attendance would supply a hapless, flailing, woefully incorrect guess. They’ll imagine that Europe’s most humungous edifice must be a bureaucratic leviathan in Brussels, a cathedral in Rome, a museum in Paris, a gilded royal residence in St Petersburg, or perhaps some gleaming new business park in Germany.
Few contestants would think of Bucharest. The last time Romania’s capital made any major claim on the popular imagination was in December 1989, when Bucharest hosted the bloodiest of the revolutions that swept the former Soviet bloc nations of Eastern Europe in that extraordinary year. Ending the reign of long-serving Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu cost the lives of hundreds of civilians – and, rather less regrettably, of Ceausescu himself and his wife Elena, dispatched by a hastily convened firing squad on Christmas Day. Less than two decades on, however, the country that the Ceausescus plundered is a member of the European Union, and of Nato. And almost all reminders of Ceausescu’s misrule have been excised from Romanian public life.
Except one, which is hard to miss – Europe’s biggest building, and the second biggest on earth, after the Pentagon. Palatul Parlamentului (the Parliament Palace) was conceived in the early 1980s as the headquarters and embodiment of Ceausescu’s regime. The result, appropriately and probably inevitably, was a building as vast and demented as the ego of the ruler it was intended to honour. Palatul Parlamentului – originally known as Casa Poporului or House of the People – is 100 metres high, 275 metres long, and 245 metres wide. It has 365,000 square metres of floor space, divided between 2,000 rooms, and 440 offices. It is sensationally ugly, certainly, if in such grand and unabashedly gauche manner that its ugliness verges on the impressive, but nobody visits this amazing edifice in order to revel in the uplifting glories of great architecture – it’s the anti-Sagrada Familia, the un-Taj Mahal.
The first time I visited Bucharest, in January 1991, a little over a year after the revolution, the Palace was, despite its considerable heft, quite difficult to find. As staff at my rundown hotel had apologetically explained, the paranoia of Ceausescu was such that street maps of Bucharest were banned for fear that they might abet invading armies. Bucharest was still, at that point, confused and traumatised. There was little doubt that people preferred the post-revolutionary chaos to the grim police state it had replaced, but Bucharest was a cold, disheartening place.
Everything was grey, including the people. Packs of feral dogs roamed the potholed streets. Buildings facing the main thoroughfares and squares were liberally pockmarked with bullet holes. Shops sold nothing. Restaurants had no food. Cismigiu Gardens, the city’s downtown park, was a dusty, litter-strewn desert dotted with dry ponds. In Piata Universitatii (the University Square), where citizens debated around trestle tables piled with the output of Romania’s suddenly deregulated newspapers, one man was attracting a respectable crowd by conducting an auction for a lemon.
Seventeen years on, such gloomy memories have faded and Bucharest today is downright pleasant. Cheaper than its European neighbours, the Romanian capital offers much of the same cultural charm but minus the crowds. There are some excellent art collections and a diverse and growing music scene. Even non-music lovers should visit the Romanian Athenaeum, the city’s circular concert hall inaugurated in 1888 and home to the country’s George Enescu Philharmonic orchestra. With its gold-leaf ceiling, pink marble columns and impressive frescoes, it is a highlight of any architectural tour of the capital.
