The Arcul de Triumf of Bucharest was completed in 1936 as a permanent memorial to Romania's victory in the First World War, replacing a wooden triumphal arch that had been built in 1878 to celebrate Romania's independence from the Ottoman Empire. Designed by architect Petre Antonescu in a classical style modelled on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the stone arch stands 27 metres tall at the head of Kiseleff Boulevard — one of the broad tree-lined avenues that make up Bucharest's early twentieth-century monumental core.
Its bronze relief sculptures depict scenes from the First World War and the reunification of Romania in 1918 — the moment when Transylvania, Bessarabia, and Bukovina united with the Romanian Kingdom to create Greater Romania. The arch was completed just as the political situation in Europe was deteriorating toward another catastrophe: within four years of its dedication, Romania would be dragged into the Second World War. Today it stands in the middle of a traffic roundabout, its martial imagery surveyed by the commuters and tourists who circle beneath it.