It’s one of the biggest buildings in the entire world.
Standing at 84 meters high, housing 7,000 rooms, and with a total floor space of 450,000
square meters, Romania’s Palace of the Parliament is a veritable monster.
Towering over the capital Bucharest, everything about it screams madness.
Its cubic volume is seven times that of the Palace of Versailles.
Its bomb-proof lower floors stretch nearly 100 meters underground.
So much stone was used in its construction that it’s been compared to the Great Pyramid
at Giza.
But while the Pyramids today inspire feelings of awe, the Parliament Palace inspires something
else - at least, once you know its story; a story of greed, fear, and megalomania the
likes of which the world has rarely seen.
Commissioned by the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the Palace was built at a time
when Romania was suffering serious economic hardship.
Intended to a symphony to the glories of socialism, it instead became the headstone beneath which
the regime was buried in a bloodsoaked revolution.
An icon of both craftsmanship and unbelievable vanity, this is the story of the Palace of
the Parliament: Romania’s Communist behemoth.
From the Ashes…
Unlike most buildings, the Parliament Palace began not with some architect sat over a drawing
board, but with a tragedy.
At twenty two past nine pm on March 4, 1977, the mother of all earthquakes hit Romania.
Registering 7.3 on the Richter scale, it shook streets for a full minute, bringing apartment
blocks crashing down.
An estimated 1,500 people died across the country.
In Bucharest, the historic core was damaged almost beyond recognition.
But crumbling buildings and dead locals were the last thing on Nicolae Ceausescu’s mind
that evening.
He was too busy trying to decide what to have for dinner.
At the moment the quake struck, Romania’s Communist leader was nearly 5,000 km away
in Lagos, where Nigeria’s military ruler was throwing a banquet in his honor.
By now, Ceausescu had been dictator for 13 years, having taken over when his mentor died
in 1965.
It had been a rollercoaster decade-plus for his fellow Romanians.
When Ceausescu initially took power, he’d been seen as a liberalizing force; someone
who might put a brake on all the crazy Communism brought to the table.
At first, he’d delivered.
Under Ceausescu’s watch, Romania had distanced itself from Moscow; gently eased up on the
repression.
Bucharest had even joined the global condemnation of the 1968 Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia,
a move which earned Romania friends in the West.
But then 1971 had rolled around, and everything changed.
That year, Ceausescu had traveled North Korea, to meet the dictator Kim il-Sung.
Hard as it may be to imagine now, North Korea in the early 70s wasn’t an impoverished,
nuclear-armed hell hole, but a stable economy pretty much on par with South Korea.
And Kim used that stability to throw his Romanian guest the welcome party of a lifetime.
As Ceausescu traveled through Pyongyang’s gleaming streets, his motorcade route had
been lined with thousands of North Koreans performing synchronised dances.
The footage has to be seen to be believed.
It looks like Kim has turned the entire city into a toy music box just for Ceausescu’s
pleasure.
To say the Romanian dictator was impressed would be a little bit like saying bears enjoy
a spot of al fresco defecation.
Ceausescu returned home determined to build a European North Korea.
The first thing he did was roll back all his previous reforms, and replace them with Kim-style
repression.
The dreaded secret police - the Securitate - were given new and expanded powers for torture
and murder, and a budget so high its estimated they had a quarter of Bucharest on their payroll.
At the same time, Ceausescu instituted a personality cult modeled after what he’d seen in Asia.
Huge portraits of him and his wife Elena were erected across cities.
The dictator began calling himself “the Genius of the Carpathians.”
Now, six years later, the Genius of the Carpathians was just starting dinner when word arrived
that Bucharest had been leveled by a quake.
Ceausescu boarded a plane back to Romania that very night.
Initially, he thought the entire capital was gone, but it soon became clear that only the
historic center had been damaged.
Still, the image of a completely flattened city seems to have lodged itself in Ceausescu’s
mind.
A vision of a blank slate, wiped clean and ready to draw on.
Just as Kim il-Sung had rebuilt Pyongyang from the ashes of the Korean War, so Ceausescu
now had a chance to build his own Socialist utopia.
It was the start of a journey that would soon drag Romania to depths of suffering its population
had rarely known.
Beauty and the Beast
The first days after the quake, Ceausescu played the role of head of state, visiting
the affected areas and ordering the search to continue for survivors.
But the idea of a European Pyongyang hadn’t gone away.
Not long after, a competition was announced to redesign the damaged city.
It came in two distinct phases.
The first was a Socialist overhaul of Bucharest’s center.
But the second was something entirely unexpected: a new focal point for the city.
Ceausescu called it “the House of the People”; a building capable of holding the entire apparatus
of Romania’s Communist government.
We now know it as the Palace of the Parliament.
Although all design elements were open in the competition, there was just one stipulation
- aside from all the usual guff about glorifying the motherland.
The new building had to be big.
So big it would impact the entire city and everyone living there.
Perhaps the person it would impact the most was Anca Petrescu.
A 28-year old graduate of the Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture, Petrescu was a junior assistant
at the State Design Institute when the two architecture competitions were launched.
Although she desperately wanted to enter, her youth made her hold back, sure she’d
make a fool of herself.
She held back as the competitions’ first year passed… then their second year.
She held back as the government pulled down the damaged buildings in Bucharest’s center,
as plans were drawn up for more and more clearances.
She held back even as the 1980s dawned, and Ceausescu rejected design after design.
Finally, in 1981, Anca Petrescu seems to have thought “to hell with this.”
If all the best architects had already been rejected, why couldn’t she at least give
it a try?
That same year, she submitted an entry.
By now, Romania had suffered a whole decade of Ceausescu’s Kim il-Sung tribute act.
The only television show allowed was a nightly report basically called Even More Footage
of Our Glorious Leader Being Awesome.
The only paintings that got made showed him and his wife, Elena, looking Communist and
creepy.
Given such a steady drumbeat of propaganda, you might expect Anca Petrescu to have been
a little overawed when she finally met Ceausescu during the competition’s judging.
Instead, it seems that Ceausescu was the one who was bowled over.
While we don’t know for certain what transpired between the two, we can infer a lot.
Especially when you hear what happened next.
After judges disqualified her, Petrescu decided to fight tooth and nail.
She quit her job - a ballsy move at a time when Romania’s economy was tanking - and
spent the next three months constructing a scale model of her architectural vision.
That “vision”, by the way, was one of supreme tat.
Petrescu dreamed up a building design so absurdly, pointlessly ornate that even Liberace would
beg her to tone it down.
It was big, white, layered like a wedding cake.
The interiors were filled with riches so over the top that only an Eastern European gangster
could ever love them.
The guys running the competition thought it was ludicrous.
When Petrescu demanded her model be shown alongside the finalists, they were all like
“that thing?
No thanks, we’ve already got somewhere to do our poops.”
So Petrescu went over their heads.
After weeks of cajoling his assistants, she managed to get in touch with Ceausescu himself.
He gave her permission to place her model in the judging hall.
When the day came to pick the winner, the Romanian dictator stalked in, went straight
to Petrescu’s design and declared he’d found his building.
The official story is that her design was just so eye-catching, just so good, that Ceausescu
fell in love.
The unofficial version is that the L word Ceausescu actually had in mind was “lust”.
And it only involved Petrescu’s building if “building” is Communist slang for “booty”.
At the age of 32, Anca Petrescu was now chief architect of the House of the People.
It would be a decision that would haunt both her and her country for the rest of her life.
The New Pyramids
By the time work began on what would become the Parliament Palace, Romania was in a desperately
poor shape.
Throughout the 1970s, Ceausescu had borrowed crazy amounts of money, hoovering up the credit
the West bestowed on Bucharest for occasionally criticizing Moscow.
When the 1980s hit, the dictator suddenly decided to pay the country’s pile of debt
back as quickly as possible.
The result was austerity before austerity was popular.
Ceausescu stripped back services, lowered wages, and started exporting all Romania’s
homemade goods.
Unfortunately, that meant there was none left over for the domestic market; and so those
Communist breadlines got longer and longer.
Yet, even as his people starved, Ceausescu began building his opulent palace.
The first phase of construction wasn’t so much actual construction as it was unnecessary
demolition.
In the years since the 1977 quake, the state had knocked down plenty of damaged buildings,
and then some not-so damaged buildings that just happened to be in central Bucharest.
Now, the bulldozers were flattening perfectly good homes without warning.
Families were given anywhere between two days and just a handful of hours to pack their
things.
Anything not removed by the appointed deadline was simply destroyed.
Up to 10,000 homes, 20 churches, and seven synagogues fell before the bulldozers.
An entire fifth of the city - equivalent to about 10km square - was reduced to rubble,
wiping out uncountable years of history.
Since this was a Communist dictatorship, locals couldn’t do anything to stop it.
Couldn’t do anything but watch in silence, and smile when someone asked them how they
felt.
In June of 1984, Ceausescu laid the foundation stone for the House of the People.
It was now time for Anca Petrescu to get to work.
It’s hard to overstate what a monumental undertaking this was.
There’s a reason the Palace of the Parliament has been called “a project akin to the pyramids.”
Everything about its construction took place on an inhuman scale.
Thanks to his brand of Communist nationalism, Ceausescu decreed all the materials had to
come from Romania.
Over one million cubic meters of marble were required, so Ceausescu had two entire mountains
leveled to provide the stone.
Each of the thousands of rooms was supposed to include wood paneling and ornately carved
doors, so the dictator decreed whole forests be chopped down.
There were single carpets that weighed over 1.5 tons.
Chandeliers 9 meters across that held a thousand lightbulbs.
To make this megalomaniacal dream reality, an estimated 1.5 million factory workers were
reassigned to making the Palace’s fittings.
This in a country with an overall population of only around 20 million.
It’s been said by many that Ceausescu was less a regular dictator than he was an old-style
European king, lording it over his peasant subjects.
It’s in building the Parliament Palace that his feudal style can be most clearly seen.
As rolling blackouts swept Bucharest… as childhood malnutrition increased…
Ceausescu sat in luxury, picking out what style of gold leaf he wanted his walls to
be paneled with.
By 1989, it’s estimated the building was swallowing 30 percent of the nation’s annual
budget.
If that sounds crazy to you, trust me.
You ain’t seen nothing yet.
A Nightmare in Stone
The last premier of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, once claimed Romania resembled:
“a horse being whipped and driven by a cruel rider.”
While that certainly gets at the suffering ordinary Romanians experienced, it does little
to show the sheer madness of it all.
A more appropriate image might be Romania as a starving horse being whipped by a cackling
murder-clown intent on driving it headfirst over a cliff.
As the House of the People grew, so did the numbers involved building it.
Tens of thousands worked around the clock in Bucharest.
On a quiet day, there might be “only” 20,000 people on site.
On a busy day, it would be far more.
Those doing the building included soldiers, political prisoners, conscripts, and anyone
else the regime could get away with dumping in the middle of a building site and telling
to get on with it.
At one point, groups of nuns were shanghaied into weaving the enormous carpets.
Aside from these menial workers, there were also 700 architects, subordinate to Anca Petrescu.
But even Petrescu was feeling the strain of working for a madman.
Ceausescu had a terrifying habit of dropping by unannounced and making sweeping changes,
meaning different rooms wound up being done in totally different styles.
In one instance, he walked into a room and complained that two ornately-carved stone
pillars weren’t identical.
Work was halted so men could go over every centimeter of the pillars with a ruler and
check for imperfections.
Eventually, one delicately chiseled rose was found to be 1cm lower than on the matching
column.
Both marble pillars were scrapped.
Other times, Ceausescu’s dictates were just weird.
He demanded all the staircases be cut to fit his tiny feet, meaning it was almost impossible
for anyone else to walk on them.
Despite Bucharest being one of those cities that’s unpleasantly hot in summer and unpleasantly
cold in winter, he refused to have aircon installed, reasoning that it might be used
in a poison gas attack.
In a similarly paranoid vein, he also had a nuclear bunker built 90m beneath the palace,
just in case.
But the real extravagances took place on the surface.
In the Union Hall, for example - a room so big you could comfortably stage the Super
Bowl in it - two vast spiral staircases were built so the dictator and his wife could make
synchronized entrances.
Lastly, Ceausescu ensured every room had a perfect echo.
Like a European king of old, he was accustomed to getting what he wanted by clapping.
And he wanted to be sure that, when he clapped inside his new palace, everyone would hear.
All told, it’s thought over 1 million Romanians worked on the building itself, in addition
to the million and a half factory workers who produced its fittings.
Nor was work just confined to this one site.
Ceausescu ordered a vast boulevard built running to the palace, deliberately ensuring it was
longer than the Champs-Élysee.
Hmm… a Palace bigger than Versailles and an avenue longer than the Champs-Élysee.
Is anyone else getting a distinct Louis XIV vibe from all this?
Come 1989, the House of the People was still only about 60% complete.
While its outside was mostly finished, inside it was empty.
A chilly marble tomb rising silently over Bucharest.
That November, the first room was declared done.
At a comically somber ceremony, Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu came to inspect it; the
first of many times they likely expected to set foot inside this behemoth.
But if that’s what they thought, Romania’s first couple were wrong.
After six years of sheer misery, their countrymen had finally had enough.
Resentment had piled high in their hearts like highly-combustible kindling.
All it needed now was a single spark.
A single spark that would start an inferno.
Luckily, in November of 1989, that spark was just waiting to be lit.
Revolution!
When Communism fell in Eastern Europe, it did so with remarkably few casualties.
The Fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, was an event more joyous than bloody.
Likewise the Singing Revolutions in the Baltics, and Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution.
But there was one major exception.
In mid-December, 1989, the unrest sweeping Eastern Europe finally hit Romania.
The western city of Timisoara exploded in protests.
Initially, they focused on the treatment of a local priest by the authorities, but soon
ballooned into something bigger.
At the time of the protests, Ceausescu was busy preparing for a state visit to Iran,
so it’s not known who gave the fatal order: Ceausescu himself, or his wife Elena.
But one of them clearly made the choice authorities in East Germany and Czechoslovakia had refused
to make.
The day after the protests broke out, December 17, the army moved into Timisoara.
There were indiscriminate shootings.
Attacks on unarmed protestors.
Although Timisoara was pacified, news of the killings spread across the country, dragging
outrage in its wake.
By December 21, the rebellion had reached such a scale that Ceausescu - now freshly
returned from Tehran - decided to go out and personally calm the crowds in Bucharest.
It would turn out to be the biggest mistake of his life.
That cold day, Ceausescu stood on his balcony, and started condemning the “fascist agitators”
in Timisoara.
But rather than being dutiful little Communists, this time the crowd started shouting back.
Cries of “Timisoara!
Timisoara!” filled the air.
You can see footage of the moment on YouTube.
The moment Ceausescu realizes these protests are different.
The moment his regime starts to crumble.
In the wake of Ceausescu’s failed speech, tens of thousands of Romanians spilled out
onto the streets of Bucharest.
Maybe if Ceausescu hadn’t become so obsessed with building the Parliament Palace, the residents
of the capital might have hesitated.
If they’d just had a little more to lose, maybe the protests wouldn’t have reached
the size they did.
But what did Bucharest's citizens have left to lose?
Their entire economy had been turned into a machine for taking bread from their mouths
and converting it into funds for the House of the People.
No wonder they were pissed.
By December 22, Ceausescu had lost control of the capital.
As crowds stormed the Party’s headquarters, he and Elena fled in a helicopter.
But not before giving one last, dreadful order.
The 2019 book, Snipers and Mistifyers documents the top secret Securitate plan activated in
the wake of Ceausescu’s flight.
It involved small terror cells using sniper rifles to randomly massacre crowds of people
to create an atmosphere of chaos.
Over the next three days, at least 800 people were killed by snipers.
Bucharest became a warzone, its streets slick with blood.
It was King Ceausescu’s retribution against the commoners for daring to stand up to him.
It was also what sealed his fate.
Not long after the killings started, the army abruptly switched sides, imprisoning the royal
couple in Targoviste.
On Christmas Day, Ceausescu and his wife were dragged before a military panel and tried
on live TV.
It was the very definition of a kangaroo court.
The trial lasted a mere hour, with no defense allowed.
Still, it’s hard not to cheer when you hear the verdict.
That same day, the Ceausescus were dragged out into the chilly winter air, placed against
a wall and shot dead.
By now, over 1,200 people had died in Romania’s revolution.
But with Ceausescu gone, the game was up.
The Securitate laid down their arms in early January, 1990.
Just as it had across Eastern Europe, Communism had fallen in Romania.
What that meant for the House of the People was anyone’s guess.
A Reminder of the Past
Given the whole “overthrowing the government in a violent revolution” thing, you’d
think the Parliament Palace would’ve been the last thing on anyone’s mind.
But it was simply too damn big to ignore.
When work ground to a halt in January 1990 everyone was like “so, what now?”
In the case of Anca Petrescu, the answer was “get put on trial.”
That year, a group of fellow architects brought a case against her for misuse of state assets.
Someone even managed to get the charge of genocide added, although comparing Petrescu
to Albert Speer is a bit of stretch.
In the end, the formal charges against Petrescu were dropped.
But she was still convicted in the court of public opinion.
During her last months in Romania, Petrescu was spat on in the street, harassed, and even
had her house set on fire.
Eventually, she fled to France, where she found work designing buildings for Club Med
- which sounds like the sort of ironic punishment Hell reserves for evil architects.
As for the palace itself… well, what could the new government do?
For two years it was left empty.
Two years in which thieves looted what they could.
Two years in which Romania tried to decide what to do with this ultimate white elephant.
After a pile of suggestions - including turning it into a Dracula theme park - it became clear
there was only one viable option.
In 1992, work resumed.
The next year, branches of government started being moved inside.
Ceausescu had planned to have all the levers of the Communist state operate from inside
his palace.
Now, it would house the entire post-Socialist government.
Come 1994, the building had been renamed the Parliament Palace, and both houses of government
relocated inside.
Although an international conference center and a modern art gallery were later added,
it’s estimated that even now, a mere 30% of the enormous building is in use.
The rest simply sits empty.
A marble sepulchre housing dead Socialist dreams.
Still, the story stumbled on a little longer.
In 2002, Anca Petrescu was invited back to Romania to add a glass cupola to her original
design.
That done, she ran for parliament, and won a seat as a candidate for the opposition Greater
Romania party.
For a moment, it really looked like all had been forgiven.
But, luckily, this isn’t the start of the tale of Petrescu’s ascent to power.
When she ran for mayor of Bucharest in 2005, she won a mere 5% of the vote.
After that, she slipped into obscurity, only returning to international headlines when
she was killed in a car crash in 2013.
Today, the Palace of the Parliament still stands in central Bucharest, only now it’s
been joined by another oversized eyesore.
The People’s Salvation Cathedral will be the largest Eastern Orthodox church in existence
when it’s completed, jostling the Parliament Palace for space on Bucharest’s skyline.
You’d think by now Romanians would be over giant monster buildings, but apparently not.
In the end, then, what is there to say about Ceausescu’s grand project?
Well, it’s certainly big, we’ll give him that.
And built to last.
There’s every chance it’ll still be dominating Bucharest even when most Romanians have forgotten
that a wannabe-king named Ceausescu ever existed.
But is there anything more to it?
That’s the question Romania still wrestles with.
Did all the suffering in the name of this monster building have some value in the end?
Or was it all for nothing; a half-decade of misery that ended only with a pointless building.
It’s not really for us to say.
We’ll leave the judgements to the people who had suffer through the Ceausescu regime.
But what we can say is that the Parliament Palace’s story deserves to be known.
It may not be a happy story, or an inspiring one.
But it is important, as any tale of suffering is.
Hopefully we’ve now done our part in making sure this history is heard.