Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Palace of the Parliament

Palatul Parlamentului, the Palace of the Parliament, is the second largest building in the world, after the Pentagon. Bucharest residents still refer to it as Casa Poporului, the House of the People.

Today it houses both chambers of the Romanian Parliament.

Ceauşescu got the idea for it after a visit to North Korea in 1972. He wanted to house all government offices in one place, in addition to, being his residence. Victory of Socialism Boulevard (now named Boulevard Unirii - Union Boulevard) would be the Champs-Élysées of Bucharest and lead to the Palace. The street was deliberately designed to be 1 meter wider on each side and 6 meters longer than the Paris thoroughfare.

About 20% of central Bucharest was leveled, including 19 Orthodox Christian churches, 6 synagogues, 3 Protestant churches, 8 relocated churches and 30,000 homes.

Construction began in 1984, 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. After the revolution in 1989, work halted for about 3 months. So much money had been invested in the palace that work resumed and it was completed two years later.

This place is massive. It can be seen from the moon. A tour of building lasts about an hour and you only get to see about 3% of the building. During the tour, the guides throw out random measurements of how big it is but it didn't mean anything to me because it was all in metric. I'm getting better at metric but I'm still not so great when it comes to really large numbers like these. So here it goes...

Area: 76,000 m² (~250,000 ft²)
Height: 84 meters (~276 ft) above ground; 15 meters (~50 ft) underground
Length: 170 meters (~558 ft)
Width: 245 meters (~804 ft)

There are 1,100 rooms and each is lavishly decorated. In each room, the ceiling pattern, matches the wall pattern, which matches the floor and carpeting pattern. Almost all of the materials used come from Romania, including 1 million cubic meters of Transylvanian marble, 900,000 cubic meters of wood, 700,000 tons of steel and bronze, 200,000 m² of carpet and 3,500 tons of crystal for the 480 chandeliers. The building is incredible but it's hard to imagine all of the money and materials used for this while the people were starving.


  1. So is it beautiful and worth the destruction of all that culture or a communist monstrosity? Does the government actually work there now and find it convenient to all be in one building? Do the Romanian people love it or hate it?

  2. This thing is just massive. It is worth visiting but it's a shame that 1/5th of the city was leveled in order to make room for it. Today it houses both chambers of the Romanian Parliament.

    The impression I got was that the people were not wild about it because they were starved in order to pay for it. But on the other hand, they are glad that it brings in some tourism money. It's 25 Lei (~$7.25) to take a tour but an additional 30 Lei in order to take pictures.

  3. I have seen a film about it, painful prove of Romanian history but worth seeing.