Bucharest · Arsenal Hill · 1974 to today
The story goes that Ceaușescu razed a hill to build the People’s House. The land-survey plans say otherwise: the top of the hill is still 88 metres above sea level, under the palace. What vanished was a whole neighbourhood, 46 streets erased or cut through by boulevards, and the earth of the hill’s spur towards the river, cut away and moved into the next valley.
Scroll, and you are back in 1974, on Uranus Street.
In 1974 Arsenal Hill, the old Spirii Hill, peaked at 88 metres above sea level, where the palace stands today. A spur ran down towards the Dâmbovița, and on the knoll at its end stood the Mihai Vodă monastery, at 78 metres. At the foot of the knoll, on Izvor Street, you were at 71.
These are the spot heights printed on Bucharest’s 1:2,000 land-survey plan, drawn between 1962 and 1978. Each one was read off the sheet and placed on today’s map.
Uranus Street started at the Dâmbovița, climbed past the monastery wall and followed the ridge towards Calea Rahovei. Around it were low houses with yards, a few villas, workshops and, on the hilltop, a works yard with a water tower.
The houses in the model are schematic: they sit where the plan shows buildings, but they are not drawn one by one.
The first demolitions came along the southern edge of the hill. The Schitul Maicilor church, built in 1726, stood at number 23 on the street named after it. The engineers Eugeniu Iordăchescu and Inocențiu Filimon raised it on hydraulic jacks, set it on rails and pushed it east. The operation took 72 hours.
The sources say 245 metres. Put the church’s old site from the 1974 plan next to its site today, behind the blocks on Antim Street, and the gap is 240 metres in a straight line, heading east-north-east. The difference is within the map’s error.
On 25 June 1984 the foundation stone of the House of the Republic was laid. By then 19 streets had gone, among them Cazărmii, Militari, Puțul cu Apă Rece, Schitul Maicilor and Intrarea Uranus, according to the list compiled by Narcis Ispas.
How many people left is not known exactly. The most quoted figure, 40,000, comes from a student report (TU Delft, 2024) that cites other work; other sources count families rather than people, and the whole rebuilt centre rather than Uranus alone.
The second wave took Izvor, Mihai Vodă, Arhivelor, Fonteriei, Bateriilor, Sfinții Apostoli and other streets towards the river, abolished or cut through by the new boulevards. Of the Mihai Vodă monastery, which housed the State Archives, only the church and the bell tower were spared.
The church founded by Michael the Brave in the late 16th century weighed between 3,100 and 3,700 tonnes, depending on the source. It was set on a concrete tray and pushed along rails, with its bell tower, in six moves, to a spot behind the blocks on Sapienței Street. It came down about 6 metres: the knoll was at 78 metres, the new site at 71–73.
How far did the church travel? The sources disagree:
On the map, the old and new sites are 205 metres apart in a straight line, give or take about 30. The rails did not run straight, so the journey was longer: 129 metres cannot be the whole distance.
Set the 1974 heights beside those on the plan updated in 1991 and a clear picture emerges. The monastery knoll and the slope below it were cut down by up to 9 metres. The Izvor valley to the west was filled with up to 13 metres of earth, up to the level of the platform.
On the ridge, the 1974 plan gives 87–88.6 metres. On the 1991 sheets, the ground around the building site is at 87.4–88.9 metres. The hill was already flat on top; the palace sat down on its summit, and the moved earth widened the platform towards the valley.
The idea that the hill disappeared probably comes from the view from below: Izvor Street, the park and the boulevard all now lie at platform level, where there used to be a valley.
The Mihai Vodă church and bell tower stand on Sapienței Street, behind the blocks on Splaiul Independenței. Schitul Maicilor is at 47 Antim Street, also behind the blocks. They are the only buildings from the hill you can still find at an address.
Pick a Bucharest street and find out whether the demolitions on the hill reached it. The streets that vanished come first in the list.
Pick a year, then turn the hill with the mouse or a finger. The wheel, a two-finger pinch or the + and − buttons zoom in and out.
The demolitions on the hill did not follow a fixed plan from the start: they widened as the palace project grew. That is why there is no single reliable figure for the people moved or the houses pulled down.
Dinu C. Giurescu wrote in 1989 that the number of houses demolished “is considered a state secret”. The exact measurements in this story are those of the engineers who moved the churches: metres, tonnes, hours.
Eugeniu Iordăchescu moved seven Bucharest churches on rails: Schitul Maicilor, Olari, Sfântul Ilie Rahova, Mihai Vodă, Sfântul Ioan Nou, Sfântul Gheorghe Capra and Sfântul Ștefan Cuibul cu Barză. The Mihai Vodă bell tower and the Synodal Palace were moved too. On the Uranus hill, the churches pulled down included Alba-Postăvari, Spirea Veche and Izvorul Tămăduirii.
The land-survey plan of central Bucharest, at 1:2,000, has sheets drawn between 1962 and 1978; the scans are published on DocuBucurești, from a digitisation made in 2000 at the “Ion Mincu” University. The sheet was fitted to today’s map using 16 landmarks that never moved: street crossings, the Gheorghe Lazăr school, the Faculty of Biology and old churches that stayed put, such as Stavropoleos, Zlătari, Sfinții Apostoli and Antim. The typical error is about 17 metres; towards the south-eastern edge of the sheet it reaches a few dozen.
The 1974 relief comes from 211 spot heights printed on the plan, read one by one, leaving out those that did not fit their neighbours. The vanished streets are traced approximately, and the houses are placed schematically inside the built-up patches of the plan, not drawn one by one.
Today’s ground is rendered from the Copernicus GLO-30 elevation model. In this model the palace is missing: over its roof it gives 82–88 metres, even though the building rises dozens of metres above the ground. The SRTM model from 2000 does show it, so over the palace footprint the platform height from the land-survey plan updated in 1991 is used instead. On that plan’s sheets, the ground around the building site is at 86–88.9 metres and is marked “land being transformed”.
Buildings and trees were filtered out of the model to leave the ground. On ground that did not change, the 1974 heights come out 2.45 metres below the model on average, a constant difference that was corrected. What remains is an error of 2–3 metres, below the up to 13 metres of fill in the Izvor valley. The relief in the model is exaggerated 4 times vertically so that it can be seen; the buildings keep their own heights.
An exact volume in cubic metres cannot be drawn from this: enough traces of buildings remain in the model, and the error is large. As an order of magnitude, about a million and a half cubic metres were cut and about as much was filled. The razed area is drawn by laying today’s buildings over the 1974 plan, to within about 30 metres; the demolitions continued east along today’s Unirii Boulevard, beyond the edge of the map.
The first version of this page, from 27 September 2026, said the hill had been razed and gave 289 metres as the distance Mihai Vodă travelled. The land-survey plans show that the hill’s earth was moved into the valley, and 289 metres is one of three figures in circulation; on the map the sites are 205 metres apart in a straight line.