Palace of the Parliament

The Palace of the Parliament is what unlimited power builds when nobody can say no: Nicolae Ceaușescu's "House of the Republic," begun in 1984 after he levelled a fifth of historic Bucharest — churches jacked up and rolled away, 40,000 residents displaced — to raise the world's heaviest building (officially: 4.1 million tonnes) and its second-largest administrative one after the Pentagon. A hundred thousand workers in shifts, a million cubic metres of Transylvanian marble, chandeliers to 5 tonnes, curtains woven with gold thread — all of it 100% Romanian by decree, an entire economy bent toward one man's reception halls while the country queued for bread. He never saw it finished; the 1989 revolution ended him first, and the unfinished colossus passed, with maximum irony, to the democratic parliament that occupies it now.

The guided tour (the only way in) walks a fraction of the 1,100 rooms and that fraction stuns: the Union Hall's 2,000-square-metre carpet woven in situ, marble staircases rebuilt twice to match the dictator's stride, the Human Rights Hall renamed with a straight face, and the balcony Ceaușescu designed for addressing the masses — used first, in the end, by Michael Jackson greeting "Hello, Budapest." Guides deliver the statistics and the dark absurdities with practiced Romanian irony; the basement and terrace add-on tours extend the dose for the committed.

Booking realities: passport or ID is MANDATORY (no exceptions, checked against the booking), tours run in timed language slots that fill in summer — book the guided-entry product ahead — and airport-style security pads the entry time. Dress for kilometres of marble corridor.

Context completes it: the Revolution's story is ten minutes away at Revolution Square (the balcony of his last speech, the memorial spike), and the razed neighbourhoods' ghost is legible in the Unirii boulevard's Pyongyang-scale axis the palace crowns. Toured together, the ensemble is Europe's most instructive lesson in what architecture confesses about power — and Bucharest's essential half-day.