Wallachia’s citadel became Romania’s richest metropolis
Bucharest, Romania’s capital on the Dâmbovița, counts about 1.71 million in the city and 2.33 million across the metro. First mentioned in 1459, it became capital of the United Principalities in 1862 and boomed after the 1881 kingdom.
The first record, from 1459, calls it the Citadel of București, a residence of Vlad the Impaler. Mircea Ciobanul built the Old Princely Court in the mid-1500s, and after 1698, under Constantin Brâncoveanu, the city became the permanent seat of Wallachia’s princes. The Ottomans later ran it through Greek Phanariot governors until Tudor Vladimirescu’s 1821 uprising. Habsburg and Russian armies occupied it repeatedly, a plague struck in 1813–14, and a fire in 1847 destroyed about 2,000 buildings, a third of the city.
The 1862 union of Wallachia and Moldavia made it a national capital, and from 1881 it was the seat of King Carol I. Gas lighting and horse trams arrived, the Dâmbovița was channelled in 1883 to end floods, and grand architecture earned it the name Paris of the East, with Calea Victoriei as its Champs-Élysées. German troops held it from December 1916 to November 1918. Between the wars it gained some 30,000 residents a year and built its Arcul de Triumf.
World War II brought the 1941 pogrom, Allied bombing, and the royal coup of 23 August 1944 that switched Romania to the Allies. Under Nicolae Ceaușescu a historic quarter was razed for the Palace of the Parliament, and the 1977 Vrancea earthquake killed 1,500. The 1989 revolution spread here from Timișoara.
Five treaties bear the city’s name, from the 1812 Russo-Ottoman peace to 1918. The Cișmigiu Gardens opened in 1847, and the Botanical Garden, once a royal pleasure park, holds over 10,000 plant species. In 2016 the World Monuments Watch listed the historic centre as endangered.
Source: Bucharest
