Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Getting your photo snapped with Emperor Trajan holding a Dacian wolf at
the National History Museum (
Click here
)
Kicking back in Bucharest's surprisingly peaceful Cişmigiu Garden (
Click
here
)
Learning why you don't appreciate granny enough at the quirky but cool
Museum of the Romanian Peasant (
Click here
)
Going absolutely nuts in the Old Town (
Click here
)
, Romania's biggest
concentration of cafes, bars, pubs and clubs
History
Lying on the Wallachian plains between the Carpathian foothills and the Danube River,
Bucharest was settled by Geto-Dacians as early as 70 BC. By 1459 a princely residence
and military citadel had been established under the chancellery of infamous Wallachian
Prince Vlad Ţepeş. By the end of the 17th century, the city was the capital of Wallachia
and ranked among southeastern Europe's wealthiest centres. It became the national capital
in 1862, as it lay on a main trade route between east and west.
The early 20th century was Bucharest's golden age. Large neoclassical buildings sprang
up, fashionable parks were laid out and landscaped on Parisian models and, by the end of
the 1930s, the city was known throughout Europe as 'Little Paris' or 'the Paris of the
East'.
Bombing by the Allies during WWII, coupled with a 1940 earthquake, destroyed much
of Bucharest's prewar beauty. In 1977, a second major earthquake claimed 1391 lives and
flattened countless buildings. Former dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu's massive redevelop-
ment of the city in the 1980s, culminating in his grandiose Palace of the Parliament
(sometimes still referred to as the 'House of the People'), drove a stake through the heart
of Bucharest's elegant past.
The violent revolution of 1989 inflicted serious wounds, both physically and psycholo-
gically. Many buildings still bear bullet holes as testament to those chaotic days in 1989
when the anticommunist uprising resembled nothing so much as a civil war. Less than a
year later, in June 1990, miners poured into the centre to support a government crackdown
on protesting students in a shocking wave of violence that reopened scars that had barely
had time to heal.
Although it's still haunted by its recent bloody past, more than two decades on,
Bucharest is clearly recovering. The historic core, the Old Town, particularly the area
