Royal, socialist, orthodox, secular: the contested space of Carol I Park, Bucharest

In the early 2000s, the heated debate surrounding the proposal to erect a huge Cathedral of National Salvation in Bucharest dominated national politics and fascinated the world’s press. While international attention focused on the extraordinary cost of the project, local controversy centred on the Romanian Patriarchate’s intention to locate the cathedral in the historically significant Carol I Park, knocking down a socialist monument in the process. The issue galvanised civic resistance around a green space in a way that had not been seen before in Romania, throwing a spotlight on questions of socialist memory and its public curation. Protest centred on the ideological appropriation of a landscape that, while ostensibly socialist, carried different historical layers of national identity. A gathering place for the 1848 Wallachian Revolutionaries, the park played a formative role in public ideas about the nation when it hosted the country’s first national exhibition in 1906. Following the creation of Greater Romania after World War I, it became a site of military commemoration and celebratory state-building, before being remodelled as a symbolic Party memory-scape after 1958. By addressing the changing ideological formations of the park, this article explores the role it has played (and continues to play) in Romanian notions of history, identity and urban amenity. In particular, it demonstrates how the emotive debates generated by the cathedral controversy have curiously rehabilitated a socialist space in a country that is often ambivalent about the public curation of its socialist past.