Bucharest keeps its history in layers: Vlad Țepeș's court cellars under the Old Town, Belle Époque palaces above them, and the demolition scars of the 1980s all around. Three days trace the city from 1459 to the gunfire of December 1989.
Vlad Țepeș signed Bucharest's first surviving document here on 20 September 1459. The excavated cellars of the 15th-century princely court reopened in 2022 after a decade of restoration, showing vaulted brickwork, Wallachian coins and stone thrones.
Built in 1724 by the Greek monk Ioanikie Stratonikeas beside his own inn, this small Brâncovenesc church has carved stone rope-work, a painted porch and a cloister paved with tombstones rescued from churches Ceaușescu demolished.
The national collection holds the complete plaster cast of Trajan's Column, taken from Rome in 1939, and the Pietroasele hoard — 22 kilos of fourth-century Gothic gold known as the Hen with the Golden Chicks, kept in the basement treasury.
The Armenian merchant Emanuel Mârzaian built this caravanserai in 1808 around a wooden-galleried courtyard. Diplomats negotiated the 1812 Treaty of Bucharest in its upper rooms, handing Bessarabia to Russia; it is Bucharest's oldest working inn.
The Ceaușescus' private residence opened to visitors only in 2016: eighty rooms of mosaic and marquetry, a mosaic indoor pool, a peacock garden and a private cinema. The 1980s furnishings stand untouched since December 1989.
Petre Antonescu's granite arch of 1936 replaced two wooden predecessors raised for troops returning in 1878 and 1918. Sculpted panels name the First World War battles, and a narrow spiral stair climbs to a terrace over Șoseaua Kiseleff.
Housed in a former arsenal west of the centre: Dacian weapons, armour from Michael the Brave's campaigns, a hangar of interwar IAR fighter aircraft, and a room documenting the 1989 revolution. Tanks and artillery fill the outdoor park.
Ceaușescu's last speech collapsed on the Central Committee balcony at 12:31 on 21 December 1989. The former party headquarters, the Athenaeum and Alexandru Ghilduș's 2005 memorial spike ring the square where the shooting began that night.
The sociologist Dimitrie Gusti founded this thirty-hectare open-air museum in 1936 beside Lake Herăstrău. Some 300 houses, churches, windmills and half-sunken earth dwellings were dismantled and moved plank by plank from every Romanian region.
The villa district west of the centre, laid out from 1890 for officers and academics, escaped the demolitions intact. Art Nouveau and neo-Romanian houses line Dr. Clunet, Dr. Lister and Dr. Grigore Romniceanu, below the 1888 Cotroceni Palace.
The Suțu family's neo-Gothic palace of 1834 houses the city museum: the great 1856 Vasilescu clock, Ottoman-era guild charters, and photographs of the Uranus district as it looked before the 1984 bulldozers displaced 40,000 residents.
The 1866 Choral Temple copies Vienna's Leopoldstädter Tempel and anchors what survives of a quarter that held some 40,000 Jews before the Legionary pogrom of January 1941 tore through the surrounding streets of Văcărești.