Bucharest: Brick by Brick
By Richard Newton (Global Traveler)
With steady determination, Bucharest constructs a foundation for its future.
We are in Piata Romana — Roman Square. Traffic swirls around us, funneled into and out of the circular intersection by six converging roads. This is modern Bucharest: shiny vehicles shuffling for space, ornately European commercial buildings framed with gaudy advertising billboards, crowds of purposeful pedestrians milling at every crossing.
Whichever road we choose from here will take us on a journey not only across Romania's capital but also through a cross section of the city's history.
The counterclockwise revolutions of the traffic at this busy junction are appropriate: In the course of a 30-minute drive, we will turn back time.
Let's go south, along General Gheorghe Magheru Boulevard. If this broad, tree-lined avenue reminds you of Paris, the French planners commissioned by Romania's King Carol I in the 19th century did their job. Under their guidance, a haphazard patchwork of medieval neighborhoods was flattened and replaced with a sophisticated layout of mansion-lined streets and leafy parks. It was not the last time that a ruler stamped his mark on the fabric of Bucharest.
The boulevard passes within a couple of blocks of Revolution Square, where four decades of communist rule came to an end 22 years ago. We pass the distinctive skyscraper housing the InterContinental Hotel, then cross University Square, the scene of some of the heaviest fighting during the 1989 revolution. Look carefully and you'll see that some of the buildings are still bullet-pocked.
The revolution culminated with the execution of the country's communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. Nearly a quarter of a century later, his ideology has been comprehensively swept away by free-market economics, but his memory stubbornly lingers in one of the greatest follies of 20th-century city planning.
As we drive south, we cross an avenue designed on a monumental scale. The receding lines of the road, with neatly planted trees and ranks of stone apartment blocks on each side, converge in the hazy distance at the foot of the world's second-biggest building (after the Pentagon), Ceausescu's "House of the People."
One-sixth of Bucharest was bulldozed in the 1980s to make way for the avenue and the mammoth marble edifice at the far end. Around 70,000 people were relocated from their condemned homes, while 26 historic churches, three monasteries and two synagogues fell victim to the wrecking balls.
The project was on too grand a scale to undo after the fall of communism, so the city has had to make the best of the deceased dictator's overblown architectural legacy. The House of the People (which, in fact, was intended to house Ceausescu and his wife as well as the Communist Party headquarters) has become the seat of Romania's democratic government.
We continue onward, passing between the bleak rows of concrete apartment blocks that betray the true face of the old Romania. In the outer suburbs, the apartment blocks are increasingly interspersed with quaint wooden houses behind picket fences.
With a final flourish of brand-new industrial buildings and a vast French-owned supermarket, the city ends and the countryside begins. Centuries of development and political upheaval are left behind. We pass through villages that appear timeless. Elderly women in traditional dress amble along the roadside. Horse-drawn carts loaded with hay trundle along the highway. Signs warn of crossing livestock.
While Bucharest has already marched into the 21st century, its rural hinterland is only just beginning the journey. The percentage of the Romanian workforce employed in agriculture (30 percent) is nearly 10 times the average of most European countries, yet the contribution of agriculture to Romania's gross domestic product has halved in the past five years and continues to decline.
Since Romania joined the European Union in 2007, modernizing the country's agricultural sector has been one of the top priorities, with a total of €14