Kathryn Page Camp: Romania

We finished our Eastern European cruise in Romania. We docked in a fairly rural area and took an excursion bus to Bucharest, which is not on the Danube. When we left the boat (for good) and were waiting for the buses, there were feral dogs close by. I didn’t see it but was told that one of them had chased a woman. When I saw them, however, they were just standing or lying about, including one lying in the street and making cars drive around it. Here’s a photo.

The bus dropped us at our hotel in mid-afternoon. In the meantime, it took us on an excursion into and around Bucharest.

Our first stop was at the Palace of Parliament. The Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, built the huge building (one of the world’s largest) as a monument to himself. In the process, he tore down houses and perfectly good buildings and spent more money than even Trump has, impoverishing the population and draining the economy. He limited people to two hours of electricity a day in order to preserve the limited energy supply available to the building and to Romanian industries.

After Ceausescu was overthrown and executed in 1989, Romania had no idea what to do with the white elephant that was very expensive to maintain. They considered selling it but couldn’t figure out how much it was worth, so they turned it into government offices. It wasn’t paying for itself, though, so they also rent out office space to commercial entities (and probably anyone who is willing to pay the rent). It also contains an international conference center and several museums and can be visited by tourists for a price, but we only saw it from the outside. The inside would have been interesting, but I’m not sure we would have had time for it.

The next two photos show the Palace of Parliament and the Central Committee Building at Revolution Square, the significance of which is described in the subsequent paragraph.

We made a short stop at Revolution Square, named after the revolution that overthrew Ceausescu in December 1989. He tried to give a speech to calm the crowds that gathered in front of the Central Committee Building, but the angry mob forced him to flee to the roof, where he escaped in a helicopter. He was captured and executed three days later (on Christmas), and that was the end of Communist rule in Romania.

Our next stop was for a walking tour and lunch in Old Town. The highlights of Old Town were the palace occupied by King Vlad III and the oldest church in Bucharest, which is right next to the palace. We didn’t go inside the church for lack of time, but we had an entirely different reason for staying away from the palace—it probably would have collapsed on our heads. The photo at the head of this post shows the palace from one direction, but the next photo, taken from a different direction, shows the true state of the wreckage. The guide said that there is some discussion about restoring it, but that will be a long time in the future, if ever.

So why is King Vlad III’s palace important? He was also known as Vlad the Impaler and was the model for Dracula. He got his nickname because he executed his enemies by running a stake through them lengthwise, starting at the space between the legs and going toward the brain. It was apparently a very slow, painful death.

Here are two other photos taken in Old Town. The first is a street, and the second is the oldest church.

The last stop on our excursion was at the Village Museum, which includes the current “palace.” The remaining members of the last royal family stay there at times, but calling it a palace may be overdoing it since there is no monarchy in Romania today. The family was staying there when we visited, so we couldn’t get too close. But the real attraction at the museum is all the old houses that were moved there to show how people used to live. One of the really cool ones is the buried house used by poor people in one region. As you can see from the final photo, only the top of the house is above ground.