Bucharest, Romania: The Urban Planning Despot

To the world, Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator who ruled Romania for 25 years, was a maverick despot who was executed on Christmas Day 1989. This ended a decade during which the world's second-largest building was being constructed while the Romanian people endured food, electricity, and heating shortages, ostensibly in order to pay off the national debt. To the residents of Bucharest, Ceausescu redesigned the sprawling capital by demolishing neighborhoods and classical monuments while paving grand boulevards: other dictators seemed tame from an urban planning perspective. Ceausescu made sure that, long after his reign, no Bucharest resident or visitor would be untouched by the way he changed the city's urban footprint.

Any conversation regarding Bucharest's urban footprint starts with the Palace of Parliament. In terms of floor space, only the Pentagon can claim more square footage (actually, square acreage would be a more appropriate measurement). It is the heaviest building in the world. An entire neighborhood was demolished in order to make room for the palace and its surrounding green space. On a tour of the palace, the guide justifiably seeks to turn the attention away from Ceausescu and toward the Romanian people, who did the hard work onsite, and the Romanian land, as almost every item used to construct the building is from Romania. Whether the history books will be as kind will be for time to tell. Some call the building an eyesore while some find it palatial. Everyone agrees that the building is monstrous, and the surrounding empty space adds to this sentiment.

Bucharest used to be known as “The Paris of the East”, a stop on the famed Orient Express, with classical architecture associated with high culture. Today, the historic center reflects this aspect of the city's past with its walkable streets and numerous theaters. In contrast, the rest of the city largely consists of a grid layout with long blocks and boulevards flanked by communist-era buildings that also serve to visually obstruct the religious architecture of previous times. Ceausescu even made sure that the grandest boulevard would be 6 meters longer than the Champs Elysses. A walk through the average street of Bucharest invokes a sense of sprawl that runs contrary to the pedestrian-friendly urban footprints found throughout Europe. And watch out for the stray dogs: more numerous than any European city, they first appeared on the streets when residents were forcibly relocated to communist-era apartment buildings and were forced to abandon their dogs.

Today, Ceausescu would probably be “rolling over his grave” if he could, seeing Bucharest as the capital of a young democracy that has already acquired membership in NATO and the EU. Alas, a visit to his grave confirms that, in a sense, the Romanian people have moved on. After his execution, Nicolae and Elena (his wife, who was executed together with Nicolae) were buried separately, on separate sides of a path in a modest Bucharest cemetery. The reasoning was that, considering the horrific killings caused by Nicolae and Elena's collective actions, Romanians couldn't bear to see them together any longer. Late last year, after some DNA tests to quash conspiracy theories, Nicolae and Elena were reburied under the same tombstone. During a visit to the site on Tuesday, the tombstone was decorated with a few flowers, with one in a flowerpot marked “boss”. In contrast to the moderateness of their tombstones seen in pictures, their graves stand out with red stone and gold lettering. For a dictator that redesigned the layout of a sprawling capital, it's only appropriate that the design of his first tombstone wouldn't be the last.