Halfway down the Danube

Damn, That's Ugly

The Palace of the People was Nicolae Ceaucescu's great monument to... well, himself, really. He had to destroy much of downtown Bucharest to build it; it was completed less than six months before the Revolution. Life Problems for Dictators: you finally get your house finished the way you like it, and then you're put up against a wall and shot.

Anyhow, the Palace of the People is either the second or the fourth largest building in the world, depending on who you talk to. The Lonely Planet says that "Romanians have a love-hate relationship" with it. Maybe. I haven't yet met a Romanian who didn't hate the damn thing.

This weekend I was walking around the downtown for several hours. (It beats sitting at home bored and lonely and missing Claudia. Also, I'm running out of books to read.)

I decided to circumnavigate the Palace.

This took over an hour and was strangely unpleasant. The Palace sits on an artificial hill. It is completely detached from the city around it. And it's really ugly, although it's a very subtle sort of ugliness. Banal rather than brutal. "As if Albert Speer had decided to bore you to death," said our friend Carlos after looking at a picture.

There's also something slightly disorienting about it. It's so big that the brain doesn't really want to register it as a "building". At the same time, for something so big it's strangely... unimpressive, somehow.

The Palace wasn't Ceaucescu's only accomplishment. He thought that Bucharest, as a major European capital city, should have a river flowing through it. Unfortunately the only river available was the tiny Dumbovitsa. It was rechanneled through the middle of downtown and then its flow was slowed down to make it bigger. Unfortunately this made it prone to floods. So they had to put it in a canal, with concrete banks.

It's not exactly the Rhine, or even the Thames. It's maybe two meters deep and 15 meters across. Thick clots of algae float on the surface. If you spit into it, you can see that there is a current, but a very very slow one -- five minutes per meter, maybe. It smells strongly of old socks.

(Remarkably, I saw people trying to fish in it. People will try to fish in all sorts of places. I truly, truly hope they're just doing it for sport.)

I don't want to paint too bleak a picture. The Romanians have turned part of the Dumbovitsa into a sort of promenade, with a little stretch of park along either side and some nice little bridges and paths. Couples stroll along it in the long summer evenings. It still smells like old socks but you stop noticing that after a while.

Still, when you look at what was done to a perfectly nice little stream, you would want to slap Ceaucescu. If, of course, he hadn't already been put up against a wall and shot.

Sometimes I wonder how much of the fall of Communism can be traced to ugliness. Maybe none, and it was all about the obvious issues: people wanting to have food on the table, a decent job, the chance to travel and speak their mind. Freedom and wealth.

But surely at some level people must have gotten tired of concrete.

Posted by douglas at July 22, 2003 11:31 PM