Little Bucharest behind the walls

After 1977 earthquake, when Bucharest old city centre was badly damaged, Ceauşescu decided not to rehabilitate most of the area, but o demolish the remnants and build the People's House (currently the Parliament House), and other huge concrete buildings from there to Unirii and beyond, and also in Magheru and Balcescu Boulevards, and other parts of the city... Huge asphalted alleys where left in the middle, meant to host military parades and mass events that didn't fit so much with Romania's population rates and military capacity. However, thousands and thousands of Romanians paraded inside Ceauşescu's head during those years, while he surveilled the works that were to transform the city into a light-grey concrete showcase for his raving ambition.Huge and heavy concrete buildings, frequent traffic jams (not in the photo, but that was a Saturday morning...), monotonous outdated urbanism... However, if you walk behind that concrete buildings you'll get surprised, as they don't comprise a series of similar blocks from Boulevard Uniri to Izvor, but constitute some kind of wall hiding a neighbourhood of small houses and backyards, where birds sing in Spring (and can be heard), where there are houses in ruins full of trash and inhabited by homeless, but also small churches from old times, village houses from the time when Bucharest was just a too grown village, fancy caffes or hotels inside fin-de-siècle bourgeois villas. A hidden world than may not be the idyllic showcase for our dreams, but at least is full of sensations and contrasts, and leave room for both despair and hope.