‘It is the sovereign who makes the palace, as a stone in a field may become an altar’: Bucharest under Carol I and the Building of Peleş

Abstract

The princely court of the voivodes of Wallachia was first established in Bucharest in the mid-fifteenth century, but the city was still little more than a cluster of caravanserais and churches, with a scattering of boyars’ houses, when in 1866 Prince Karl of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen became Carol I, Prince and — after 1881 — King of the newly created state of Romania. Carol had an exalted sense of the duties and dignity of kingship, and he immediately embarked on an ambitious programme of modernising and embellishing Bucharest to transform it into a capital city worthy to be the seat of a royal court and government. At the same time, many of the boyars built palaces in Bucharest in order to be near the court. Early in his reign, however, Carol felt impelled to build the castle of Peleş in Sinaia as his personal ‘altar’ in the ‘field’ that was Romania, the cradle of his dynasty and emblem of his devotion to his adopted country and its people.