Inside Europe’s most terrifying building

I’m hiding in an unlit toilet while my guide paces the carpeted galleries outside. Memories of watching The Shining for the first time as a petrified teenager are foremost in my mind.

Surreptitiously puffing on my e-cigarette to (vainly) calm my nerves, I take a deep breath, step back out into the hanger-sized, endless, garishly carpeted corridor and wonder why on earth Romanian tourism chiefs make such a big deal out of the “Dracula” castle in Transylvania.

Vlad the Impaler (the supposed inspiration for Bram Stoker’s novel) never lived in the much-modified military citadel that was originally called Dietrichstein. Whereas Nicolae Ceausescu ordered the building of the Palace Of The Republic personally and laid its foundation stone 40 years ago this month.

Far greater terrors lie here than could ever be prompted by highly dubious tales of 15th-century Counts.

I was 11 years old in 1989 when the bloodied image of Nicolae Ceausescu’s corpse was emblazoned in full colour on the front page of my grandma’s Daily Mirror. It was, I am certain, the first time I had ever seen an image of a dead body.

Hiding the newspaper underneath her settee, it stayed there for months. When I dared, I would unfurl it and attempt to understand the mendacious regime, and eventual execution of the Romanian Communist dictator and his hated wife Elena.

Tales of their kleptocratic, repressive reign of fear over Romanians that spanned a quarter of a century are well documented. But what is now called the Palace of the Parliament is strewn with urban legends and fabrication, as I discover while on a tour through just a few of its 1,000-plus rooms on a humid Sunday afternoon with my guide Lidia, who offers private visits around this baleful edifice.

“People say crazy things about this building,” she explains as we navigate the security checks (visitors on a tour must bring their passport as the Romanian Senate and Chamber Of Deputies are both based here) and walk into a room the size of several football pitches lit by immense crystal chandeliers (some in the building weigh up to five tonnes) and lined with a headache-inducing miasma of stucco, bas reliefs and pink marble.

“People have written that the glass ceiling in this room is retractable and that it was built for a helicopter to come through it,” Lidia says with scorn. “People have been watching too many Mission Impossible and James Bond movies. You can’t fly a helicopter in and out of a room. Surely people should know this?”

Yet, when it comes to what is still the third largest administrative building on the planet, much of its true stories do seem to belong to the world of fantasy, albeit a highly dystopian one that was, for ordinary Romanians, horribly real until the revolution of December 1989.

Entire neighbourhoods of Bucharest, lined with Belle Epoque, Cubist and neo-Fascist buildings, were demolished before work began in June 1984. It was an ominous year that showed, in Romania at least, that Orwell’s vision could sail dangerously close to reality in a nation just three hours flight time from London, or Airstrip One if you prefer.

Utilising his friendships with other tyrants, such as Mobuto in Zaire and the Ayatollah in Iran for materials, Ceausescu’s palace, not quite completed by the time of his death, would become seven times the size of Louis XIV’s palace in Versailles in cubic terms. Buckingham Palace could fit into the underground car park area at the rear.

“History has kept not what was consumed (by the people), but what was accumulated,” was a common bon mot of Ceausescu. His palace would be the ultimate Cold War-era manifestation of hubris and megalomania, using up around 30 per cent of the national budget.

A noted lover of 1930s Fascist-Brutalist architecture, Nicolae and Elena were personally involved in every element of design, working closely with the then all-but-unknown architect Anca Petrescu. It is said she was chosen to be chief architect, ahead of more garlanded rivals, because her small-scale model was the most glittering.

Some residents of the old neighbourhoods were given a mere six hours’ notice to vacate their homes before the bulldozers moved in. They were displaced in order to construct endless rooms, lined with panelling hewn from Romanian cherry and chestnut trees and columns made from Iranian marble. There are well over 1,000 rooms here and even Lidia herself admits that there are areas she still hasn’t been to, despite having worked in the building for 20 years.

The gaudiness of the décor, the very definition of dictator kitsch, means it’s no surprise when Lidia tells me that there were plans to turn the palace into a casino in the 1990s. Many Romanians claim that Donald Trump expressed an interest in buying the place in that same decade.

Lidia is keen to contradict another oft-stated fact that the palace is so enormous that, even today, much of it lies empty as nobody has any idea what to do with its absurd dimensions.

“We are here on a Sunday so, of course, it is very quiet today,” she insists as we walk down another sepulchral gallery, waking up a security guard who is dozing on a leather banquette.

“But all of the rooms are used for something. Many private events take place here. So if you came here when the Senate is in session then you would see many people.”

By the time we enter around the 20th room choked with more marble, five-ton chandeliers and Grand Mosque-size rugs, I begin to feel distinctly unwell.

Never before, even in North Korea, has the combination of endless boastful stats on size and volume, combined with such grandiose materials and the knowledge of what suffering was endured by the majority in order to create such a colossus, manifested in my feeling so physically nauseous I have to run to a bathroom to vape, then splash cold water onto my face.

Yet, as much as I am frightened, I am fascinated by this monstrosity. The planned opening date of August 25, 1990, came too late for the Ceausescus. Shot against a wall while on the run in the small town of Târgoviște, the sheer size of their ultimate physical legacy (though rumours that Ceausescu intended it to be his mausoleum are untrue) has far outlasted their rule.

Briefly considered for demolition, before the sheer cost of knocking it down was calculated, and deemed to be unviable, the Palace is now, perhaps to Nicolae and Elena’s eternal chagrin, the cynosure of democracy in Romania.

Yet, it is impossible not to feel that ghosts of Romania’s despotic past lurk in these dimly lit, endless corridors and vacated rooms.

Afterwards, still feeling giddy, I walk through Bucharest’s old town, alive with young Romanians drinking, dancing and cavorting around the streets, lined with restaurants such as Blank (inside an opulent former bank, now the Marmorosch Hotel, part of the Autograph Collection), which serve up oysters from New Zealand and Philly cheese steaks as well as creditable Romanian wines and a delicious take on traditional cabbage and cream soup.

Bucharest natives would have to be in at least their late 40s now to have any clear, first-hand memories of the Ceausescu regime. But as Diana, a 35-year-old off-duty waitress I speak to one evening, explains, nobody, thanks to the sheer size of their palace, can ever be ignorant of the Ceausescus, regardless of their age.

“I was only two months old when they were killed,” she tells me. “But my Mum always said that if my brothers and I weren’t good then Elena Ceausescu would come and get us in the night.”

Dracula’s myths are, mostly in today’s Romania, only of real interest to visitors. For Romanians, the true monsters, and the doomed Communist castle they built in the centre of the capital, remains a far more potent, ghostly presence.

Rob Crossan was a guest of Tui (tui.co.uk), which offers two-night city breaks to Bucharest, staying at the Novotel Bucharest City Centre on a room-only basis. Prices from £496 per person, based on two adults sharing a double room and including flights from Heathrow. Tui can also arrange private guided tours of the Palace of Parliament