The People's Palace


The People's Palace was built by the Communist Dictator Nicolae Ceauseascu, and is the largest palace in the world, by a long way. This place is huge. It's buit on an area of 135,000 square meters, and the actual floor space is 330,000 square meters which makes it the largest building in Europe and is in fact the second largest building in the world, after the Pentagon. It has 6 registers and 21 bodies comprising master executive suites, reception and conference rooms, the Hall of the Chamber of Deputies’ Plenum, the hall of the columns, offices. There is also a theatre, art gallery and restaurant inside. Overall, the palace contains about 1.000 rooms of 100 to 2.600 sq.m. with 480 colossal rooms on the second floor alone. Behind the Palace of Parliament there is a park platform of 290.000 sq.m. It is almost 90 meters tall. If you were to spend 5 minutes in each room, it would take you almost three weeks to see the whole palace!

All walls are covered by hand carved marble, all light fixtures are crystal, all the wood you see is hand carved Cherry (very expensive). Ceausescu was very strange, and since he controlled the country, money was no object. It is estimated that the palace contruction costs could be as high as 2 Billion US Dollars. Everything from the materials used, to the architects, and I mean EVERYTHING, was either mined in Romania, born there or grown there. Nothing is from the outside. That was Ceausescu's wish.

This building is only about 20 years old. To this day it is still only 90% complete, and in some areas there are builders building it. Since it is very expensive to maintain it, most of the chandeleers are switched off to save money, small parts of it are viewable by the public, and the building work is much slower than during the Dictator's reign, so it will take a few more years before the palace is truly finished.

Nowadays the building is used as the Parliament's headquarters and as an important regional International Conference Center.

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Me and Luke standing on one of the fountains with the People's Palace behind us. Each fountain represents a county. 41 counties in Romania, 41 faountains. The fountains strech along the boulevard for 1 km.
A similar view of the People's Palace.
A view of the boulevard along the opposite direction of the Palace, along thefountains.
People's Palace At Night, from the side.
The main entrance. Could do with a lick of paint...
The main hall.
The doors were designed to close, then the whole wooden frame splits in two and can slide into the walls. Why? So that it's wide enough that the tanks can fit through of course! No, seriously. It's true! :-S
One of the hallways on the ground floor.
Hallway on ground floor.
Entrance that was used by Ceausecu.
The staircase by the entrance used by Ceausescu. Note the two curtains at the top. They are 16 meters tall each (almost 50ft) and weigh 2 metric tons each.
Another hallway, I think.
A banquet hall.
Different view of the banquet hall.
Luke in a balcony. The boulevard behind is 4km long, has 41 fountains, and is 1 meter wider than the Shonse Leise (spelling) in Paris. Ceausescu was a bitter man heh.
Me with the same view.
A better view of the boulevard.
A conference hall.
Different view of the conference hall.
Note the hand carved marble everywhere, and the gold leaf, and the crystal chandeliers, so much for being all equal. Did I mention that he was executed after the revolution? He was responsible for 2500 people's deaths during the revolution, and he and his wife were the last people to be killed in Romania as now capital puishment is no longer practiced.
The second largest chandelier in the building weighing in a 2 metric tons, all crystal of course. The largest is twice the size of this one, we couldnt see it as it was in an area closed to the public.
Another conference room.
Another hallway.
I've no idea as to the purpose of this room.
That is a skylight 22 meters up, that's nearly 70 feet. The reason you can't see the light is because it's dirty with dust from the building work going on up there. A lot of gold leaf on there.


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