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Hunting and Adventure in Romania


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Transylvania	Brasov	Bran	Scornicesti	Bucharest
Black Sea	Danube Delta	Fagaras	Sinaia	Bucovina
Maramures	Sighisoara	Iasi	Cluj-Napoca	Timisoara
Bucharest Romania's capital - named after its legendary founder, a shepherd called Bucur - lies on the Wallachian plains, between the Carpathian foothills and the Danube River. In the 1930s it was known as 'the Paris of the East'. Since then, earthquakes, WW II bombing and Ceausescu have combined to destroy much of its prewar beauty. In the 1980s Ceausescu bulldozed 7000 homes and 26 churches in historic southern Bucharest to build a Civic Centre. The focal point of what locals dubbed 'Ceausima' is the enormous 12-storey Palace of Parliament , intended to be the largest building in the world - it's actually the second, after the Pentagon.
Ceausescu - who was executed just as it neared completion - intended it to house the president's office, central committee and all the state ministries. The Iliescu government did not know what to do with this white elephant - many people wanted it demolished - but in 1994 decided to use it to house the Parliament and to host international conferences. There are guided tours, so you'll get a chance to gawp at the ornate 3100-room interior as well as the mesmerising exterior. For a taste of the old, head for central Bucharest, where the 16th-century Old Court Church contains beautifully preserved frescoes. The George Enescu Museum displays the musician's manuscripts and personal belongings. Also here is Romania's very own Raffles, the Athenee Palace Hotel , centre of early-20th-century decadence, and the meeting place of Olivia Manning's characters in The Balkan Trilogy . It has just had a US$50 million facelift and is the city's classiest and most expensive hotel. In western Bucharest you'll find Ghencea Civil Cemetery , final resting place of the Ceausescus. Nicolae's grave is quite ornate and decorated with flowers and candles, but Elena is apparently less revered by those who still mourn their overthrow. Their son Nicu (Transylvania boss, drunkard, playboy and one-time partner of the Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci) is buried close by. Bucharest offers a wide range of accommodation options, including private rooms, university campuses, hostels and hotels. The main places are in the centre or around the main train station (Gara de Nord). Bucharest has seen a rapid influx of flashy, upmarket, expensive restaurants offering international cuisine, but it is still easy to track down traditional Romanian cooking in central Bucharest. This area is also the focal point for nightlife: you'll find plenty of entertainment here, including bars, nightclubs, theatres and cinemas. BUCHAREST (Bucuresti), with a population of over two million, may be the largest city between Berlin and Athens, but it's by no means the most beautiful. At first sight the city is a chaotic jumble of traffic-choked streets, ugly concrete apartment blocks and grandiose but unfinished Communist developments. Lying 64km from the Danube, Romania's southern border, but 600km from its northern frontier, it's also far removed from the country's more obvious attractions. And yet, it's Romania's centre of government and commerce and site of its main airport, so most visitors to the country will find themselves passing through Bucharest at some point. Founded by the princes of Wallachia and dominated by their Turkish overlords, Bucharest only came into its own with Romanian independence in the late nineteenth century, when it was remodelled by French and French-trained architects. The city was dubbed the "Paris of the East", as much for its hectic and cosmopolitan social scene as for its architecture. The Romanian aristocracy was among the richest and most extravagant in Europe, but this lifestyle depended on the exploitation of the poor, and in Bucharest the two coexisted in what Ferdinand Lasalle described as "a savage hotchpotch", with beggars waiting outside the best restaurants and appalling slums within a few steps of the elegant boulevards. Under Communism these extremes were reduced, but Capitalism has brought back conspicuous consumption and a new poor. Despite the signs of Westernization and a new prosperity, with glossy shops full of designer clothes and a rapidly expanding restaurant scene, few Bucharestians can afford to indulge in them. The architecture of the old city, with its cosmopolitan air, was notoriously scarred by Ceausescu's redevelopment project, which demolished an immense swathe of the historic centre and replaced it with a concrete jungle, the Centru Civic, including a huge new palace for the Communist leader, now known as the Palace of Parliament. The palace has become one of the city's prime tourist sites and is best viewed along the approach from Piata Unirii. The other site that can on its own justify a visit to the city lies to the north of the centre: the Village Museum , a wonderful collection of vernacular buildings collected from all regions of Romania. Between these two poles, in the centre of the city, the National History Museum lays out the story of Romania's development from prehistoric times to the 1920s. It's in much the same style as every other county museum, but this is the biggest and best in the country.

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