The Kiseleff Museum Axis

Piața Victoriei

Bucharest's northern crossroads, where six boulevards meet and the government palace faces the start of Kiseleff.

You're standing in Piața Victoriei, the big crossroads where Bucharest's northern half fans out. Six boulevards meet here, and the one that matters for this walk, Șoseaua Kiseleff, leaves the square's northern corner and heads straight toward the arch. The long travertine block across from you is Victoria Palace, the seat of Romania's government. It went up between 1937 and 1950 to plans by Duiliu Marcu, was hit during the Second World War, and was finished with its pale stone cladding in the early Cold War years.

The square took its name in 1878, after the War of Independence, when soldiers marched home through a wooden arch thrown up roughly where the modern arch now stands. Today the plaza is mostly a transit knot: metro trains run below, and traffic circles the central island. The museums are north of here, up the avenue with its double rows of trees. Cross toward Victoria Palace, then walk north up Kiseleff.

Șoseaua Kiseleff

The wide tree-lined avenue laid out in 1832 that carries the walk north from square to arch.

You're now on Șoseaua Kiseleff, the wide avenue cut through the Băneasa woods in 1832 that has been Bucharest's front door ever since. It is named for Pavel Kiseleff, the Russian general who governed the Romanian principalities in the 1830s. He gave the country its first constitution, and when officials offered to raise him a statue, he told them to spend the money on planting trees instead. The trees multiplied, and in 1843 the landscape gardener Carl Meyer laid out a park at the avenue's southern end, with ornamental trees and a small lake.

The street took Kiseleff's name the following year. By the late nineteenth century this was the city's fashionable promenade, famous for its flower fights, when carriage passengers pelted each other with blossoms, a scene Ștefan Luchian later painted. The avenue still does double duty: embassies and old villas hide behind the greenery, and every first of December the national day parade rolls north through the arch you can see ahead. Keep walking.

The arch is about ten minutes from here.