by I hide in an unlit toilet while my guide paces the carpeted galleries outside. Memories watching The Shining For the first time as an agitated teenager most important in my mind.
Puffing on my e-cigarette (in vain) to calm my nerves, I take a deep breath, step back into the hanging, endless, garishly carpeted corridor and ask why on earth the tourism chiefs do the Romania benefited so much from it. the “Dracula” castle in Transylvania.
Vlad the Impaler (the supposed inspiration for Bram Stoker’s novel) never lived in a heavily modified military fortress originally known as Dietrichstein. Whereas Nicolae Ceausescu personally ordered the construction of the Palace of the Republic and laid its foundation stone 40 years ago this month.
There is much more horror here than the highly dubious stories of the Counts in the 15th century could ever have inspired.
I was 11 years old in 1989 when the bloody image of Nicolae Ceausescu’s body was in full color on my grandmother’s front page Daily Mirror. I’m sure, it was the first time I saw an image of a dead body.
Hiding the newspaper under his care, he remained there for months. When I was scared, I would let it out and try to understand the mischievous regime, and eventually the execution of the Romanian Communist dictator and his wife Elena.
Stories of his kleptocratic reign, oppressed by his fear of Romanians that lasted a quarter of a century, are well documented. But what is now the Palace of Parliament is steeped in urban legends and fabrications, as I discovered while touring a few rooms of its 1,000-plus people on a humid Sunday afternoon with my guide Lidia, who offers private tours around . this baleful building.
“People say crazy things about this building,” she explains as we go through the security checks (tour visitors must bring their passports as the Romanian Senate and Chamber of Deputies are located here) and walk into a room that as much as some football. fields laden with huge crystal chandeliers (some in the building weigh up to five tons) and lined with a miasma of stucco, bas-reliefs and pink marble.
“People have written that the glass ceiling in this room can be retracted and that it was built for a helicopter to come through,” Lidia says with horror. “People are watching too much Mission Impossible and James Bond films. You can’t fly a helicopter in and out of a room. Surely people should know this?”
But, when it comes to the third largest administrative building on the planet yet, much of its true story seems to belong to the world of fantasy, albeit a very dystopian one, for ordinary Romans, real terrible 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 a terrible year that showed, in Romania at least, that Orwell’s vision could be dangerously launched close to reality. nations just three hours’ flight from London, or Airstrip One if you prefer.
Using his friendship with other tyrants, such as Mobuto in Zaire and the Ayatollah in Iran for material, Ceausescu’s palace, which was not completely finished by the time of his death, would be seven times larger than a palace Louis XIV at Versailles in cubic terms. Buckingham Palace could fit into the underground car park at the back.
“History did not keep what the people ate, but what they accumulated,” was Ceausescu’s usual motto. His palace would be the last manifestation of Cold War-era rubbish and megalomania, consuming about 30 percent of the national budget.
Nicolae and Elena were personally involved in the Fascist-Brutalist architecture of the 1930s and were personally involved in all aspects of design, working closely with the then unknown architect Anca Petrescu. It is said that she was chosen to be the chief architect, ahead of more garlanded competitors, because her small-scale model was the loudest.
Some residents of the old neighborhoods were only given six hours’ notice to leave their homes before the bulldozers moved in. They were displaced to build endless rooms, lined with panels carved from Roman cherry and chestnut trees and columns made of Iranian marble. . There are over 1,000 rooms here and Lidia herself even admits that there are areas she hasn’t been in yet, even though she has been working in the building for 20 years.
Because of the décor, the definition of dictator kitsch, it’s no surprise when Lidia tells me that there were plans to turn the palace into a casino in the 1990s. Many Romanians claim that Donald Trump showed interest in buying the place in that same decade.
Lidia is keen to refute another oft-mentioned fact that the Palace is so huge, even today, that much of it is empty because no one has any idea what to do with its absurd dimensions.
“We’re here on a Sunday so, of course, it’s very quiet today,” she insists as we walk down another sepulchral gallery, waking up a leather-feasted security guard.
“But all the rooms are used for something. Many private events take place here. So if you came here when the Senate was in session you would see a lot of people.”
By the time we enter around the 20th room and it’s crammed with more marble, five-ton chandeliers and rugs the size of the Great Mosque, I start to feel distinctly ill.
Never before, even in North Korea, the combination of endless boastful stats on size and volume, together with such grandiose materials and the knowledge of what the majority suffered in order to create such a colossus that, expressed in my feeling physically. nauseous I have to run to a bathroom to vape, then splash cold water on my face.
But, as much as I’m scared, this monster fascinates me. The planned opening date, August 25, 1990, came too late for Ceausescu. Shot against a wall while on the run in the small town of Târgoviște, the sheer size of their final physical legacy (although rumor has it that Ceausescu intended it to be his mausoleum) is much older than his rule.
Briefly considered for demolition, before the enormous cost of knocking it down was calculated, and before it was deemed unviable, the Palace is now, perhaps to the eternal chagrin of Nicolae and Elena, the racism of democracy in Romania.
However, one cannot help but feel that ghosts from Romania’s despotic past lurk in these unlit corridors and empty rooms.
Afterwards, still feeling giddy, I walk through Bucharest’s old town, alive with young Romanians drinking, dancing and cavorting around the streets, lined up with restaurants like Blank (inside an opulent former bank, as now the Marmorosch Hotel, part of the Autograph Collection), serving New Zealand oysters and Philly cheese steaks as well as prestigious Romanian wines and a delicious taste of traditional cabbage and cream soup.
Bucharesters would have to be at least in their late 40s now to have any clear memories of Ceausescu’s regime. But as Diana, a 35-year-old off-duty waitress I talk to one evening, explains, no one can be ignorant of the Ceausescus, because of the size of the palace, regardless of their age.
“I was only two months old when they were killed,” she tells me. “But my Mum always said that if my brothers and I weren’t good then Elena Ceausescu would come to get us at night.”
Dracula myths are most prevalent in modern-day Romania, and are a real treat for visitors. For Romanians, the real monsters, and the doomed Communist castle that they built in the center of the capital, are still present much more powerful, ghostly.
Rob Crossan was a guest of Tui (tui.co.uk), which offers two-night city breaks to Bucharest, staying in the Novotel Bucharest City Center on a single room basis. Prices from £496 per person, based on two adults sharing a double room and including flights from Heathrow. Tui can also arrange private guided tours around the Palace of Parliament
