Halfway down the Danube

Inside the Palace

I went inside the Palace of the People yesterday.

Although we've been in Bucharest for almost a year now, this was my first time inside. Go figure. We've never gotten around to taking the guided tour (it's a popular tourist attraction), and this happened to be the first time that business took me down there. (A banking conference, and no, you don't want to know the details.)

I came prepared to sneer. As I've said before, the Palace is pretty damn ugly from the outside. So I figured it would be just as bad inside -- either tastelessly overdone, or crass and pompous and massive in a Stalinist sort of way, or both.

I was wrong. The inside of the Palace is actually pretty impressive.

Part of this is because it's just so... damn... big. I mean, imagine the interior of a royal palace, with marble pillars and great high ceilings and of course enormous curved staircases. I mean, really imagine it -- see it in your mind.

Got it? Now scale everything up by a factor of two -- higher ceilings, taller pillars, a hall you could play football in, staircases sweeping up through four or five stories.

So, at just a basic gosh-wow level, you can't help being impressed. But it doesn't end there. The decor is not horrible. I won't say it's great or even good. Actually, it's rather bland... lots and lots of huge columns, vaguely floral giltwork on the ceilings, repetitive geometric motifs on the marble floors, big red carpets. Nothing wow. But nothing yuck, either. That was a pleasant surprise.

I admit, I'd been expecting either "Louis XIV in Las Vegas" ghastly excess, or lots of sterile expanses of Socialist Spartan hideousness But it was not that bad, at all.

Oh, and I was also thinking there'd be either pictures and statues of the heroic workers and revolutionaries of Romania in their struggle to build multilateral socialism, or lots of blank spots where they'd been removed or painted over. Not so. Either Ceausescu never got around to installing those, or they've been very carefully removed. Or replaced -- there is some recent artwork, including some pretty good religious paintings.

Also, I think I was subconsciously expecting more decrepitude. Much of the Palace is not occupied, and never will be -- you can see from the outside that many of the windows, especially on the upper floors, are broken or boarded up. But the Romanians seem to have made a strong effort to keep the inhabited parts in good condition.

Of course, I wandered off from the inhabited parts for a brief exploration...

Posted by douglas at May 12, 2004 10:33 AM