Height is a sign of power. For much of human history, tall buildings have functioned as symbols of the might of institutions and ideals. The Parthenon was built at the top of the Acropolis to show the dominating power of the Athenians and the god they revered. The towering World Trade Center showed off the power of American capitalism to tourists and New Yorkers alike who couldn’t help but look up and admire them.
Compared to most cities I’ve been to, Bucharest is quite short. Although it’s a large metropolis with nearly 2 million people, there are few skyscrapers that dominate the skyline. I had been thinking about this while wandering around the city with two of my classmates on one of the first days of the program when we stumbled across Carol I Park. We made our way to the top of the hill at the center of the park and turned around. Although the trees blocked our view of nearly every building, the tops of two towered over the rest of the city.
Both buildings were familiar, even though we had only been in Bucharest for a few days, because they are visible from many parts of the city, and together, I realized they told a story about power and Romanian nationhood.
The first building, which is perhaps the most famous building in Romania, is the Palace of the Parliament. The Palace of the Parliament is a massive building – it’s the second largest administrative building in the world after the Pentagon – and has a notable history. It was built by Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu as the centerpiece of the systematizing urban planning project he instituted in the 1970s and 1980s. If tall buildings tell a story of power, the Palace of the Parliament tells a story of the power of the state. To build his vision of a utopia, Ceaușescu decimated neighborhoods and displaced some 50,000 people. In its place, a symbol of the communist Romanian nation was constructed with Romanian marble, crystal, and wood. To me, the building symbolizes the power of a state to claim a vision of the nation – systematized, luxurious, powerful – while ignoring the plight of the people whose interests it claims to represent.
Of course, Romania is no longer a communist country, yet the Palace still stands, occupied, in part, by the nation’s parliament. For a country with a rising extreme right and deep ties to its authoritarian past, the state being embodied by a building with a hidden destructive past that, in a symbol of power, towers over the rest of the city, makes sense. This, obviously, is far from a uniquely Romanian thing. In the United States, the Capitol building, built by enslaved people for enslaver politicians, towers over Washington as an apt symbol for our complex past and contentious present.
The second building visible from Carol I Park is the People’s Salvation Cathedral, otherwise known as Romania’s National Cathedral. It began construction in 2009 largely with state money and is the largest Orthodox Cathedral in the world. Towering over the city, it, to me, symbolizes the power of the Church in Romanian conceptions of nationhood. Both of the Cathedral’s names make some claim to defining the nation. Calling it the “National Cathedral” clearly ties it to the nation and “People’s Salvation Cathedral” suggests a reductive view of who can be saved – only Romanians – and through which religion – only Orthodoxy. Despite this, Romania is a country with both historical and modern religious diversity. At times, this has made building a cohesive national identity difficult. Because of this, religious institutions, particularly the Romanian Orthodox Church, of which the National Cathedral is a part of, have aligned themselves with nationalist and sometimes fascist political movements. This is not to suggest that religious institutions in Romania are purely destructive forces. On the contrary, religion can be, and frequently is, a beautiful space for building community. But, by making a claim to the national identity, and doing so with the power that the height of the building represents, the National Cathedral both symbolizes and participates in a form of reductive nationalism in Romania.
Like I suggested at the beginning of this post, Bucharest is a completely new city for me. When I first arrived, one of the first things I told my parents was that it felt unlike any other place I’ve been to. Beyond the Palace of the Parliament and the National Cathedral, each abandoned building, every piece of graffiti on the streets, all of the plazas, monuments, and street names tell a story about Romania’s complex history and how the country defines and expresses itself today. That’s what makes this city so interesting and, if you open your mind to the beauty of storytelling, so stunning.