The interesting facts about Romania are:
1. It’s home to the world’s heaviest building
Bucharest’s vast Palace of the Parliament, begun during the final years of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s rule and not finished until 1997 (seven years after his death), is 240 metres long, 270 metres wide, 86 metres high (12 storeys), and cost a staggering €3 billion (£2.5bn) to build.
The other numbers are remarkable. As many as 100,000 people worked on the site, hundreds of whom are thought to have perished. It has 1,100 rooms (the vast majority of which lie empty) and an annual heating bill of $6m (£4.63m), equivalent to that of a small city. There are eight underground levels, as well as a nuclear bunker linked to other government buildings by 20km of tunnels.
It all adds up to an area 365,000 square metres, second only to The Pentagon as far as administrative buildings are concerned, and it has a volume of 2.55 million square metres, a shade more than the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Inside you’ll find 3,500 tonnes of crystal, 480 chandeliers and 1,409 ceiling lights, while 700,000 tonnes of steel and bronze was used for monumental doors and windows. Guinness World Records recognises it as the heaviest building on the planet.
2. And the World’s Most Beautiful Road
In his search for the “world’s best driving road” Jeremy Clarkson declared that he had found it in the middle of Romania – in the form of the Transfagarasan highway. Whichever way you look at it, it is an extraordinary feat of engineering: a stretch of tarmac packed with tunnels, viaducts and bridges and which takes the skill of navigating hairpin bends to new heights. The road was another Ceaușescu creation. He wanted to ensure that in the event of a Soviet invasion there was a speedy way of escaping through the strategic (and scenic) mountain passes of the Southern Carpathians (not that it was ever used for that purpose).
3. And an Answer to Mount Rushmore
This sculpture, on a rocky outcrop at the river Danube’s Iron Gates Gorge, was made between 1994 and 2004 and depicts Decebalus, the last king of Dacia, who fought against the Roman Empire.