The Romanian palace built by a dictator

Bucharest is a city that has been through a lot and it certainly feels like it. I went with my friend Laura and we spent two days there.

We visited the Palace of Parliament, the second-largest administrative building in the world after the Pentagon in the US. It is the both the most expensive and heaviest building in the world, as big as the c*nt who ordered it, dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The building has more than 3000 rooms and is still not finished.

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I almost wish I’d never paid money to see it, it was just such extravagant nonsense in the rooms that had been finished. It was built in 1984 at an estimated cost of €3.3 billion, by over 700 architects, and three shifts of 20,000 for 24 hours a day for five years while Romanian people starved.

Hospitals ran out of supplies and industries stopped producing goods. In keeping with dictatorial paranoia, it has an inbuilt underground nuclear bunker. When it was all lit up, back in the 80s it used all of Bucharest’s power for the day in four hours. One-sixth of the city was actually bulldozed to make room for it and there is not a trace of humanity within. Ironically, its local name is ‘House of the people’.

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Ceausescu and his wife, Elena (dubbed the Romanian Eva Peron) are of course now in hell. Their bodies were secretly and hastily put in a local cemetery, they were buried apart as they were considered to have done too many bad things together in life.

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Looking back at the photos that I took, such opulence sickens me, although I did learn something by being there. Romania has gone through so much and it deserves a democratic government who will look after the interests of its people.