Meeting Ion Iliescu, and how North Korea changed Romania
In this exclusive extract from his new book, Romania: Rude & Vile, a collection of stories about travelling, politics, history, revolution, architecture, books, and people, author Rupert Wolfe Murray recounts a revealing encounter with Romania’s former president, Ion Iliescu. The main tourist attraction in Bucharest is a building that was inspired by a visit to North Korea by Romania’s then communist dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu in 1971. Today, its official name is Parliament Palace. Before 1989 the name was the House of the People; foreign tourists call it Ceauşescu’s Palace. If you believe the hype it’s visible from the moon, it’s bigger than Cheops’ Pyramid and over a million cubic metres of marble were used in its construction. It’s hard to find reliable information on how much it costs to run but I came up with the figure of twenty million euros a year; another source tells me that it cost about three billion euros to build. That almost every foreign visitor I came across in