BucharestRomania  ·  Systematisation and everyday concrete

Almost nobody arrives in Bucharest with a picture of it already in their head. Belgrade and Berlin have been photographed into the imagination; Bucharest has not. It turns out to be an advantage — the city gets to surprise you.

The building you cannot walk around

Arcul de Triumf comes first: granite, squarely built, covered in reliefs, raised for the dead of the First World War and openly modelled on the Paris arch. It is the plainest surviving statement of this city's old nickname and its old ambition.

Then there is the Palace of the Parliament, which you do not need to go inside to understand. It is the heaviest building on earth and the largest administrative building after the Pentagon, with over a thousand rooms, built using something close to Romania's entire marble output, on ground cleared by demolishing a large part of the historic city. It is too big, too white, too symmetrical — the proportions are designed to make whoever stands in front of them smaller. Walking its perimeter takes longer than feels reasonable, and somewhere in that walk the scale stops being a statistic.

Obor, where nobody is photographing

The monuments were built to be looked at. What I wanted to see was the ordinary version, so I went out to Obor, a district that appears on no tourist map.

The atmosphere changes immediately. There are no cameras. There are rows of unrenovated socialist blocks in grey precast panel, balconies loaded with washing lines, satellite dishes, pot plants and stored furniture, decades of water staining down the facades. These blocks were the ideology made literal: thousands of households filed into a single geometric order. The order did not survive. The buildings did, and they are full — the cold blueprint has been kneaded back into something with a temperature. The old trams that run between them are worth riding for their own sake.

The other Bucharest

Lipscani, the old town, is a different city again. Cărturești Carusel is a nineteenth-century building that stood derelict and is now a bookshop: six floors of slender white balustrades spiralling around an open void, daylight dropping from a rooflight onto white walls. After a day of grey concrete it works as a kind of rest for the eyes.

A few streets away, Stavropoleos Monastery is small enough to walk straight past — 1724, in the Brâncovenesc style particular to Romania, with a deeply carved stone porch and a planted courtyard. It sits one wall away from a street of loud restaurants and does not appear to have noticed them.