The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Carol Park — Parcul Carol I — is part of one of Bucharest's most historically layered monuments. The original monument was erected in 1923 following the First World War. During the communist period, the Romanian government rebuilt the mausoleum in 1958, moving the remains of heroes to the site and redesigning the monument in a socialist realist style — a neoclassical structure with an eternal flame, surrounded by honour guards in the tradition of Soviet military memorial culture.
Carol Park itself carries layers of Romanian history: it was laid out in 1906 for a national jubilee exhibition, housed a mausoleum for communist heroes that was subsequently demolished after 1989, and now contains the monument as it stands — a place where the interwar, communist, and post-communist periods of Romanian national commemoration are all physically present, in adjacent structures, in the same park. The eternal flame burns, the guards change, and the history that produced the monument remains contested.