Now an energetic commercial centre, Bucharest, Romania’s capital city, still bears in its architecture and landscape traces of the country’s communist history.
ADVERTISEMENTNow an energetic commercial centre, Bucharest, Romania’s capital city, still bears in its architecture and landscape traces of the country’s communist history.
An iconic landmark, the Palatul Parlamentului government building, erected by communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu, is the second-largest administrative building in the world and looms over the city, where a whole neighbourhood was razed to make room for its construction.
The building’s underground bunker is a reflection of Ceaușescu’s paranoia that a revolution was imminent – a fear that was well founded: he was executed at the end of the 1989 Romanian Revolution, which spelt the end of the communist regime in the country.
The balcony from which Ceaușescu made his last public address is part of a new tourist attraction in Bucharest that takes in the sights of the city’s communist past.