The church that walked away on rails

Constitution Square

If you stop in Constitution Square and try to fit the People's House into a single photograph, you run into a problem: the building does not fit. Too wide, too tall, too deep for any ordinary lens. So are its numbers: the bucharest.ro account “Beyond the Numbers” takes them one by one.

4 March 1977

On 4 March 1977 an earthquake badly damaged Bucharest, and the reconstruction became the pretext for a new civic centre. Arsenal Hill — the old Spirea Hill — was also chosen for having the lowest seismic risk in the city. But the hill held the Uranus neighbourhood: sloping streets, boyar villas, modest houses.

The demolitions began in the early 1980s and ran on, in successive waves, until close to the end of the decade. Early plans would reportedly have let the Mihai Vodă complex stay near the future House of the Republic; the option fell away, and in January 1985 the authorities ordered the evacuation and demolition of the complex.

What followed is hard to measure: how many houses, how many people — the figures agree to this day on nothing. But one church did not die. It walked away on rails.

The press of the time and since speaks of 40,000 PEOPLE (Mara Popescu's TU Delft thesis, after Light & Young, 2013) or of over 57,000 FAMILIES (Irina Dragomir's Groningen thesis, after Panaitescu, 2012) — people or families, depending on the source — while the COURAGE registry counts over 60,000 FAMILIES moved for the WHOLE rearrangement of the centre, not Uranus alone. No single toll is printed here: it keeps all three, unit and source beside each.

Demolished buildings run between 9,000 and 40,000, depending on the source. Why nothing exact survives: the demolitions never followed one plan set from the start, but expanded gradually as the People's House project itself kept changing — which makes a centralised, exact record unlikely to have ever existed (the Uranus Acum researchers, via bucharest.ro).

Three Uranus places of worship were demolished: Alba-Postăvari, Spirea Veche and Izvorul Tămăduirii. Two others — Schitul Maicilor and Mihai Vodă — were physically relocated and hidden behind the new blocks, to keep them as inconspicuous as possible. The 22 churches razed between 1977 and 1987, per the Associated Press, cover the Bucharest of those years, not the neighbourhood. For the whole rearrangement, COURAGE counts 5.86 km² demolished, some 20,000 properties destroyed and 19 streets blocked or erased.

Uranus Street ran, as the Uranus Acum project maps it, right through today's stretch of the People's House where the contemporary-art museum sits. Under the floor you walk as a visitor today there was once a street.

Autumn 1985

In the autumn of 1985, the church of Mihai Vodă and its belfry set off downhill on rails, in tandem, with six spatial movements (Bejan). By the most frequently cited figures (bucharest.ro, after the historical sources), the church travelled 289 metres and came down 6.2 metres from the former hill level; the COURAGE registry gives the same figures. The church weighed 3,100 tonnes on engineer Bejan's count, within 3,100–3,700 cited; the belfry, 289 tonnes. Put your finger on the church and pull it yourself: 289 steps, one metre each.

Under the church a concrete tray had been built — the engineer had thought of the waiter carrying full glasses without spilling a drop (AFP, 2017) — and the tray slid along railway rails. After the move the church stayed closed for almost ten years; it reopened for worship in 1994.

In 1986 the photographer Cristian Zaharia caught the complex among the rubble: the church and its belfry standing, the excavator at work.

Today you can walk along Splaiul Independenței and pass very close to the church without noticing it. Access is from Sapienței Street, through a passage between the blocks, near Izvor Park.

June 1982

Three years earlier the first one had walked: Schitul Maicilor, the 1726 post-Brâncoveanu jewel. Engineers Eugeniu Iordăchescu and Inocențiu Filimon, of the Bucharest Project Institute, moved it in 72 hours — the first translated church in Bucharest (Răfailă, 2019).

745 tonnes, lifted 1.67 metres on 22 hydraulic presses at 11 working points; a 13°49′ rotation after 19.26 metres, 245 metres in a straight line, a second rotation of 36°30′ so the altar would face east, and 25 centimetres down onto the new socle. Beforehand: injections into the wounds of the 1977 quake, vault shoring, the paintings protected.

In 1980 the parish priest, Mihai Ionescu, had vehemently opposed the demolition. Two years later the surrounding buildings were removed — although moving them with the church had been proposed, the authorities would not agree. Of the old complex nothing remains but the tiny church, tucked away today behind a massive building, at 49 Antim Ivireanul Street.

The People's House is famous for its numbers. Guides recite them indoors: the second administrative building in the world, thousands of rooms, tonnes of marble. But the numbers shift from one guide to the next, from one site to the next, from one newspaper to the next (bucharest.ro). Touch each number: it melts into variants. And the church nobody counted was measured to the metre.

Not even the author stands inside one number: Anca Petrescu was 28 or 31 at the selection, depending on the source, and led some 700 architects; the Chamber of Deputies answers a public-information request by saying it holds no documentation to confirm or deny the exact authorship. The accurate form: chief architect and public face of the project.

On the site stood some 20,000 people at any hour — a figure confirmed by Anca Petrescu herself — and underground worked between 5,000 and 12,000 soldiers, depending on the source. That much can be said plainly; the rest are variants.