From dictators to storytellers, Bucharest draws visitors in. Photo / Getty Images
They tell good stories in Bucharest, even when the tales include the wrongdoings of a hated dictator, writes Simon Wilson.
We’re standing on a metro platform in Bucharest, the capital of Romania and the fourth-largest city in the European Union.
“This is the university stop,” says our guide. “There wasn’t supposed to be a university stop. The dictator thought students were fat and lazy, so a longer walk to the campus would be good for them.”
It was the late 1980s and they built it anyway. Which must have taken some courage. Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator in question, worked hard to be a friend abroad to everyone from Fidel Castro to Richard Nixon, but he was a hated tyrant at home.
READ MORE: Experience the Danube from Budapest to Bucharest on a Viking river cruise.
When he was eventually toppled after a popular uprising in 1989, he and his wife Elena were charged with genocide, “tried” and promptly put up against a wall and shot.
Before that, though, what happened when Ceausescu found out about the students’ subway station?
The guide looks away. They tell good stories in Bucharest and you discover it’s best not to ask too much. They lived through all manner of misery. The stories are what they have.
And a view that not everything that came after communism has been great. The McDonalds near the American embassy has “the worst burgers in the world”; Taco Bell is “the greatest threat to Mexican culture in the world”.
Perhaps it was the Ceausescus themselves who gave them a licence for storytelling: the couple lived in a fantasist’s dream that makes Donald Trump look like a modest man.
It’s all on show in their mansion, a building that from the street looks elegantly plain, in the modernist style, until you come around the corner and discover the colonnaded Grecian portico, complete with marble stairway.
Inside, everything is preserved as it might have been the day they tried to flee. Richly woven tapestries, gold, parquet and more marble everywhere.
Their wealth was obscene, but Elena’s taste, if you’re into the ornate, was impeccable.
Her bathroom floor is tiled in the palest pink. The taps are gold, the bath surrounds are gold and an enormous gold cupola is set into the ceiling. And there’s a bed.
Our guide is very tall, dark and lugubrious, with enormous hands. He’s like some gothic strangeling from the Carpathian Mountains to the north. Another storyteller, with a dry and very dismissive sense of humour.
“The gold is sprayed on,” he says, flapping a hand.
Elsewhere there are large paintings of wholesome peasant life. “These are pre-communist,” he says. “They have nothing to do with communist ideology.” People were not healthy and happy under communist ideology.
“Many people think everything in the house was made in Romania,” he says. He nods at a van Gogh reproduction on an office wall. “Not that, obviously.”
Nor the enormous woven carpets. “These carpets were made in Bulgaria, bought by Israel and sold back to us as genuine Turkish.”
There’s a giant old boxy TV. “Romanians see this piece of crap and it brings back memories.”
The house has 50 rooms, including one for the very large swimming pool, its sides and the walls of the entire room lined with beautiful mosaic tiles.
It’s grand and ghostly, as if the Roman Empire had been restored to life, and then, Vesuvius-like, snuffed out again.
Bucharest still struggles, but thanks only in part to the corruption and tyranny of the communists. The market economy that came next didn’t help much either. Transport is the measure of it.
While 2.5 million people live in the city, another half a million arrive to work there every day because, said our first guide, “people living rurally don’t want to work on farms”.
They have trams and even some cycleways, but buses provide the bulk of the public transport. And yet cars are prioritised everywhere. The result: the buses can’t move, so everyone drives, and so the cars can’t move either.
They built a ring road to manage the traffic, which took 20 years, and now it’s “Europe’s biggest parking lot”.
In the 1980s, the communists built 80km of metro track: that university stop was one small part of the second-fastest-growing underground rail network in the world (after Mexico’s). When capitalism arrived, it took another 10 years to add just 6km.
“The bureaucracy was slovenly and lazy,” says the guide.
Maybe nobody gets it right. Society, human rights, economic opportunity. Romania is a country of enterprise and it’s better now for being in the EU.
This was part of a Viking river trip on the eastern Danube and I’d go back if I could. The Carpathians are a wilderness of ancient forests, home to wolves and black bears and the heartland of European folklore. To the south, the river flows slow and wide and along its banks every town has a lovely faded charm.
Old country. New challenges. On the map, the next country up is Ukraine.
GETTING THERE
The writer visited Bucharest as part of a Viking river cruise.
From Auckland, you can fly to Bucharest Henri Coanda International Airport with one stopover in Dubai, flying with Emirates.
DETAILS
Viking offers river cruises on all the main waterways of Europe, including several on the Danube. The full river trip runs from Amsterdam in the west to the Black Sea in the east, but for those seeking a shorter trip, there are stages that begin or end in Paris, Budapest and various German cities.
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, urban issues and travel. He joined the Herald in 2018.
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