When the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu visited North Korea, back in June 1971, he was so impressed with what he saw that years later he decided to set up his peculiar little piece of Pyongyang in Bucharest, the capital of his own country. The city had suffered the ravages of a terrible earthquake in 1977, so Ceaușescu took the opportunity to build a fortress at the height of Kim Il-Sung. One capable of rivaling the pyramids of Giza or any other European palace. The result is architectural megalomania taken to hyperbole: a colossus that still today holds the official record for the heaviest building in the world.
A madness built on the basis of astonishing figures and delirious investments. And today it serves as one of the main institutional buildings in Romania.
A fortress for Ceaușescu
When he visited North Korea and China, the leader of the Romanian Communist Party was so surprised by the cult of the personalities of Mao Zedong and Il-Sung, grandfather of Kim Jong-Un, that he decided to create a peculiar replica of the North Korean capital in his land. As? With a huge palace. And the opportunity for such a megalomaniac plan ended up being given by an earthquake, the earthquake that shook Bucharest in 1977, destroying buildings and wreaking chaos.
In those ruins Ceaușescu found the impetus to build his particular House of the People, a palace that would bring together all the ministries and become the nerve center of his government. The first stone of the megabuilding The Romanian communist leader himself placed it in 1984, but he did not have time to see it completed. When he was executed, on Christmas Day 1989, there was still a lot of work pending to complete the fortress: the building was 60% complete, so work on the plot had to continue advancing throughout the 90s.
The enormous palace would end up making it into the pages of the Guinness World Records for its tons of steel, bronze, marble and other materials, but the reality is that the project was an outrage from its very beginning. Instead of adapting the play to Bucharest, it was decided to adapt Bucharest to the play. To fit the new People’s House dreamed of by Ceaușescu, it was remodeled an entire neighborhood of the capitaltaking away other buildings and temples.
The Guardian It states that approximately a fifth of the city was demolished to build the palace, the surrounding buildings and the avenue that connects it, a huge road, at the height of the fortress. The cost of that, beyond the investment in hard cash? The forced relocation of 40,000 residents and the dismantling of buildings, some later rebuilt
The original project contemplated 80,000 m2, but ended up extending beyond that. Much further. With the cost that this implies, of course. The palace website details that around twenty churches were destroyed and almost a dozen were moved, 10,000 homes were demolished and 57,000 families were evacuated. Among the affected buildings are some with special value, such as the Văcăreşti Monastery or the Brâncovenesc Hospital.
That does not mean that the area was left deserted. More than 100,000 people participated in the construction of such a colossus, with almost 20,000 workers who worked in three shifts 24 hours a day and even 12,000 soldiers who joined the task between 1984 and 1990. There is also talk of the participation of hundreds of architects, although the most remembered is undoubtedly Anca Petrescu, the chief architect, who He identified the work with Buckingham or Versailles.
A hyperbolic building
Although pharaonic projects such as The Line or the Jeddah Tower have accustomed us to XXL works, the technical specifications of Ceaușescu’s People’s House continue to impress even today, almost 40 years after the start of his works. According to data from the Romanian Government, the building measures 270 meters long, 245 wide and 84 high, although it extends another 16 below ground level. Its surface area is around 365,000 m2. It may not be the kilometer high that the Saudi skyscraper aspires to or the 170 km length of The Line, but it is impressive.
Such a size makes the Bucharest palace, in fact, one of the largest in the world of its kind. Its official website states that it occupies the first place among administrative buildings for civil use and is the third in terms of volume, although the terrain of the records tends to vary with some frequency. Without going any further, in India they have just built the largest office building in the world, a block of 613,100 m2, and Boeing is managing a construction of 13,385,378 m3 in Washington, which makes it the largest according to that parameter. .
If the Romanian palace stands out for something, it is because of the figures that cannot be seen, at least not the same as the height or surface. The property is listed in the Guinness World Records as “the heaviest” in the world thanks to the enormous amount of materials it incorporates: 700,000 tons of steel and bronze and 3,500 of glass, one million cubic meters of marble and almost 900,000 of wood. The list is extensive and does not end there: 550,000 tons of cement, two million tons of sand and one thousand tons of basalt. It is sometimes noted that it is also the most expensive building ever built.
Some point out that the Great Pyramid of Giza surpasses it in weight with its 5.75 million tons, but the Romanian colossus still maintains the title on the Guinness website. For reference The Burj Khalifa is estimated to be emptythe tallest building in the world today, reaches a weight of 500,000 tons.
And since the floors, ceilings, windows and facades are not enough to form a megapalace, the building also includes a good amount of furniture. Its website specifies as a reference that it incorporates 2,800 chandeliers, 220,000 m2 of carpets and another 3,500 m2 of leather. When building the palace, by the way, national materials were prioritized, so almost the entire construction was created with products from Romania.
Ceaușescu didn’t just want a huge government headquarters; He wanted an efficient armored fortress, proof of earthquakes and explosions and attacks, no matter how harsh they were. In fact, it is said that he asked the architects to create several evacuation tunnels and “the most effective anti-atomic bunker” in the world, capable of withstanding an earthquake of more than 8 degrees Richter and two atomic bombs.
Today the result of that megalomaniac dream is, ironies of history, a tribute to democracy and Romanian historical memory. With Ceaușescu’s death, the doubt arose what to do with that colossus still in works. “They couldn’t afford to demolish the buildings, but they also didn’t have the money to silence the feeling of horror they gave off,” he explains to The Guardian Emanuela Grama, from Carnegie Mellon University. Thus, it was decided to continue working on the project, eliminating all symbols that made reference to the communist regime and the nods to Ceaușescu.
As for what benefit to get out of it, it was proposed to turn it into the largest shopping center in the world, a casino that would dwarf any of the great towers of Las Vegas or even transform it into a theme park dedicated to another figure linked to the Carpathians, in the middle path between history and fantasy: Dracula. None of those ideas prospered. The authorities ended up opting for the simplest option, which was to convert it into the Palace of the Romanian Parliament. Today the Senate, the Chamber of Deputies and even several museums are located there.
Over time the building has become an important tourist attractionalthough, at least in 2019, visitors took two-kilometer tours that barely covered 5% of the palace. Understandable, considering that just one of those rooms is the length of half a football field and needs eight chandeliers to illuminate it. The Guardian He explains that when walking through the corridors of the palace, one of the details that attracts attention are the immense empty spaces that open on both sides.
The reason? They were reserved for portraits of Ceaușescu and his wife.
Images | George M. Groutas (Flickr), Adam Jones (Flickr), Wikipedia, Dennis Jarvis (Flickr) and CIC
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*An earlier version of this article was published in November 2023
