I hide in an unlit toilet while my guide walks through the carpeted galleries outside. Memories of watching The shining for the first time as a petrified teenager are at the forefront of my mind.
As I surreptitiously puff on my e-cigarette to (in vain) calm my nerves, I take a deep breath, step back into the hanging, endless hallway with garish carpet, and wonder why on earth the Romanian tourist chefs are making such a big deal out of it. to make the “Dracula” castle in Transylvania.
Vlad the Impaler (the supposed inspiration for Bram Stoker’s novel) never lived in the heavily modified military citadel originally called Dietrichstein. While Nicolae Ceausescu personally ordered the construction of the Palace of the Republic and laid the foundation stone forty years ago this month.
Here lie far greater horrors than could ever be caused by highly dubious stories about 15th century graves.
I was eleven years old in 1989 when the bloodied image of Nicolae Ceausescu’s corpse appeared in color on the front page of my grandmother’s corpse. Daily mirror. I’m sure it was the first time I’d ever seen an image of a dead body.
She hid the newspaper under her couch and stayed there for months. If I dared, I would unfold it and try to understand the lying regime and eventual execution of the Romanian communist dictator and his hated wife Elena.
Stories of their kleptocratic, repressive reign of fear over the Romanians, which lasted a quarter of a century, are well documented. But what is now called the Palace of Parliament is littered with urban legends and fabrications, as I discover while walking through just a few of its more than a thousand rooms on a humid Sunday afternoon with my guide Lidia, who offers private visits around the city. this disastrous building.
“People say crazy things about this building,” she explains as we navigate through security checkpoints (visitors on a tour must bring their passports as the Romanian Senate and Chamber of Deputies are both located here) and enter a room the size of a few football matches. pitches lit by immense crystal chandeliers (some in the building weighing as much as five tons) and lined with a headache-inducing miasma of stucco, bas-reliefs and pink marble.
“People have written that the glass ceiling in this room is retractable and that it is built so that a helicopter can come through,” Lidia says dismissively. “People have been watching too much Mission Impossible and James Bond films. You can’t fly a helicopter in and out of a room. People should know this, right?”
But when it comes to what is still the third largest administrative building in the world, many of the true stories seem to belong to the world of fantasy, albeit a very dystopian world that was terribly real for ordinary Romanians until the revolution. of December 1989.
Entire neighborhoods of Bucharest, lined with Belle Epoque, Cubist and Neo-Fascist buildings, were demolished before work began in June 1984. It was an ominous year that showed, at least in Romania, that Orwell’s vision could sail dangerously close to reality in just a three-hour flight from London, or Airstrip One if you prefer.
Using his friendships with other tyrants such as Mobuto in Zaire and the Ayatollah in Iran for materials, Ceausescu’s palace, which was not yet fully completed at the time of his death, would increase in cubic terms by seven times its size like Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles. Buckingham Palace could fit in the underground car park at the rear.
“History has not preserved what was consumed (by the people), but what was collected,” was a common bon mot of Ceausescu. His palace would be the ultimate manifestation of Cold War-era hubris and megalomania, taking up about 30 percent of the national budget.
Nicolae and Elena, a well-known enthusiast of the fascist-brutalist architecture of the 1930s, were personally involved in every design element and worked closely with the then virtually unknown architect Anca Petrescu. It is said that she was chosen as chief architect, ahead of more florally decorated rivals, because her small-scale model was the most stunning.
Some residents of the old neighborhoods were given only six hours’ notice to leave their homes before the bulldozers moved in. They were displaced to build endless rooms, lined with paneling from Romanian cherry and chestnut trees and columns made from Iranian marble. . There are over a thousand rooms here and even Lidia herself admits that there are areas she still hasn’t been to, despite working in the building for twenty years.
The ostentatious decor, the definition of dictator kitsch, means it’s no surprise when Lidia tells me that in the 1990s there were plans to turn the palace into a casino. Many Romanians claim that Donald Trump showed interest in purchasing the property in the same decade.
Lidia would like to contradict another oft-stated fact: the palace is so enormous that even today much of it remains empty, because no one has any idea what to do with its absurd dimensions.
“We’re here on a Sunday, so it’s obviously very quiet today,” she points out as we walk through another tomb gallery, waking a guard dozing on a leather banquet.
“But all the rooms are used for something. Many private events take place here. So if you came here while the Senate was in session, you would see a lot of people.”
By the time we enter around the twentieth room, smothered by more marble, five-ton chandeliers and carpets the size of a Grand Mosque, I’m starting to feel distinctly unwell.
Never before, not even in North Korea, has the combination of endless boastful statistics about size and volume, combined with such grandiose materials and the knowledge of the suffering that the majority had to endure to create such a colossus, have manifested in my feeling so physically. nauseous I have to run to a bathroom to vape and then splash cold water on my face.
But as scared as I am, I am fascinated by this monstrosity. The planned opening date of August 25, 1990 came too late for the Ceausescus. While they were shot into a wall while on the run in the small town of Târgoviște, the sheer size of their ultimate physical legacy (although rumors that Ceausescu intended it as his mausoleum are untrue) has more than outlasted their rule.
The palace was briefly considered for demolition, before the enormous costs of tearing it down were calculated and deemed unviable, and is now, perhaps to Nicolae and Elena’s eternal chagrin, the cynosure of democracy in Romania.
Yet it’s impossible not to have the feeling that ghosts from Romania’s despotic past lurk in these dimly lit, endless corridors and abandoned rooms.
Then, still dizzy, I walk through Bucharest’s Old Town, full of young Romanians drinking, dancing and running around the streets, lined with restaurants like Blank (in an opulent former bank, now the Marmorosch Hotel, part of the Autograph Collection), which serves New Zealand oysters and Philly cheesesteaks, as well as worthy Romanian wines and a delicious twist on traditional cabbage and cream soup.
Bucharest residents would now have to be at least in their late forties to have clear first-hand memories of the Ceausescu regime. But as Diana, a 35-year-old off-duty waitress I speak to one evening, explains, thanks to the sheer size of their palace, no one can ever be ignorant of the Ceausescus, regardless of their age.
“I was only two months old when they were killed,” she says. “But my mother always said that if my brothers and I were not well, Elena Ceausescu would come and get us at night.”
The myths of Dracula, especially in modern-day Romania, are only of real interest to visitors. For Romanians, the real monsters and the doomed communist castle they built in the center of the capital remain a much more powerful, ghostly presence.
Rob Crossan was a guest at Tui (tui.co.uk), which offers two-night city breaks to Bucharest, staying at the Novotel Bucharest City Center on a room-only basis. Prices from £496 per person, based on two adults sharing a double room and including flights from Heathrow. Tui can also arrange private tours of the Palace of Parliament