Scenes from Bucharest

Bucharest, June 23

Our cruise ended in Bucharest, Romania. We disembarked from the Viking Primadonna in the morning, spent the day sightseeing, and then said adieu to our shipmates.

One of the most remarkable sights we visited was the Palace of the Parliament (sometimes called The People’s House). It’s an enormous government building constructed by former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in the 1980s. Ceausescu ruled Romania from 1965 until he was executed in the 1989 revolution that ended communism in the country. At the time, the building was 70% completed.

One might wonder why an autocratic dictator running a police state needed a parliament building, let alone the largest one in the world. Well, turns out that during a visit to North Korea, he was pretty impressed by Kim Il-sung’s cult of personality. Ceausescu figured he could top that. Combine absolute power with meglomania and you can get away with constructing the world’s second largest building in a relatively poor country.

The Palace of the Parliament has an astounding 3.7 million square feet of floor space. (Seattle’s tallest building, the 76-story Columbia Center, has 1.5 million s.f.). Only the Pentagon has more floor space.

We visited a dozen enormous and impressive meeting rooms, assembly rooms, and halls. We were not surprised to learn that this was also the world’s most expensive building to construct.