The park drawn before it existed

The sheet shows the hippodrome with its stands, the linked lakes, the suspended bridge, a velodrome with stands, a “ruine gothique, château d'eau”, a water castle, plus greenhouses, kiosks, a dairy and a model theatre. Above the road stand the “CASARMELE ARTILLERIEI”, and at the southern edge the “MAHALAUA ȚIGANILOR”. The map says by itself where Craiova stood then.

After the Aman library, the architect appointed for the project was Edouard Redont, “who also designed the National Exhibition in Carol Park, Bucharest”. The county council's tourism portal agrees. Redont took the project of the future park to the International Exhibition in Paris in 1900, “and the project was awarded the Gold Medal”, again after the library. The Paris prize list was not found online, so the medal stays the Craiova sources' claim, not a verified fact.

Redont (1862–1942), a landscape architect from Reims, is listed by the French heritage inventory as “Redont ; Edouard (architecte paysagiste)”. In Bucharest his plan still stands as Carol Park — more at the parks of Bucharest; his story here stops at Craiova.

The legend reads like a menu of the last century: music kiosk and brasserie, velodrome, lawn tennis, a suspended bridge and a gothic ruin hiding a water castle. What the scan does not show speaks as loudly: no graphic scale, no signature, no date. A sheet for showing, not for measuring.

With the same method on all three, the “leisure=park” polygon in OpenStreetMap and the same area formula, the results are: Tineretului 149.9 ha, Herăstrău 137.89 ha (from three polygons: 51.8 + 35.06 + 51.03), Romanescu 92.89 ha. The independent test: the Bucharest-parks project measured the same objects and found 137.2 and 149.0 ha; the differences, at most 0.9 ha, are small beside the 45.0-hectare gulf between Romanescu and Herăstrău.

The order holds however you turn the published figures: Craiova's park comes after Herăstrău, which alone cancels, between parks measured alike, “the largest in Eastern Europe” and “the largest urban green area in Romania”. And “second in Romania” falls at the measure too, because Tineretului is larger than both.

As for “natural park”: people drew, dug, planted and fenced it, in the middle of a city. It is an urban park by definition, as the English Wikipedia also says. “Natural” is a pretty word here, not a category.

How it was measured: each park is a “leisure=park” polygon in OpenStreetMap, and the area comes from the same shoelace formula. Romanescu and Tineretului are hand-drawn, with dozens of nodes on the outline; Herăstrău comes from three older remote-sensing polygons. That is why the independent test matters: the Bucharest-parks project measured the same objects on its own and found nearly the same figures. The order does not hang on decimals: between Romanescu and Herăstrău lie 45.0 hectares, fifty times the gap between the two reckonings.

The guides also say the roads, alleys and paths “total over 35 km in length”. The OpenStreetMap survey counts 24.65 km in 177 ways inside the fence today. The difference may be unmapped trails, not lies in the guides; the page shows both values.

The test was run five ways, on landmarks matchable today — the gate, the bridge, the castle, the stands, the lakes — with the bridge and castle picks the shakiest. No fit escapes errors over a hundred metres, and the plan's velodrome oval lands some 480–640 metres south of today's cycling track. Either the drawing is an exhibition watercolour, with artistic licence, or the built park has since lost a good piece of its west and south.

Without a survey of the period, the page cannot decide between the two, so it lays not the drawing over your town but today's measured park, 92.89 ha inside the fence. The drawing stays what it was in Paris: the project, not the ground.

In short: the sheet was fitted to the ground five ways, on today's landmarks. The best fit errs by 35–135 metres on its anchors and some 480 at the velodrome. Redont's book on Craiova, or a period survey, would settle it; neither was found online.

The park lies in southern Craiova, its great gate facing north. Go in, pass the 1943 bust, climb to the hill pavilion, then walk down to the lake: the suspended bridge, the water castle and the landing stage all stand within a few hundred metres of each other. The park also holds a zoo, built at the start of the century too, after the library.

The fence line measures 4.4 km, about 53 minutes at a normal 5 km per hour pace; the longest crossing, 1599 metres as the crow flies, takes some 19 minutes. And if you want to see the Paris sheet with your own eyes, it is at the Aman library, under “Local memory”.

For the walk, the reckoning helps: 24.65 km of alleys are on the free map; the lap of the fence would take 53 minutes. The zoo stands in the park too, and the lighting modernisation dates from 1964, again after the library.

By the same Frenchman's hand, in Bucharest: Carol Park.

The park's history, project and dates come from two Dolj institutions, whose pages were read on 11 October 2026. The measurements in the text — hectares, kilometres, walking times — come from the page's own computations on the free OpenStreetMap survey; the source ways are public (see the Measure below) and anyone can check them.