vpcod: Discovering Bucharest on two wheels

Yesterday I did something I wanted to do for the past 2 weekends...I got back on my bike and joying a group of bikers explored the unknown part of the city.

Did you know that Bucharest, is surrounded by a ring of 18 fortifications built in the late 19th century.

A report by the War Ministry led the celebrated Belgian military architect Henri Alexis Brialmont (who made several visits to Bucharest, meeting with King Carol in the process) to draft a plan for the city's fortifications, with construction beginning in 1884. The forts, about 4 km apart, cost 111.5 million gold lei (15 million were initially allocated), or three times the annual army budget. The forts took over two decades to build, and work was quite complex; the walls are two metres thick in places. All 18 were linked by a road and a railway, which today is DN100, Bucharest's ring road. 18 subterranean batteries were placed between the forts, and the fortification ring included some 240 pieces of artillery in all.

Romania, which had recently won its independence from the Ottoman Empire, undertook this enormous effort in keeping with the prevailing military doctrine of the day, which said the capital city should be defended at all costs. In case of invasion, Bucharest was to be the point of retreat, but also the place where significant military operations would begin, spreading from the Danube to the Carpathians.

At the beginning of the 20th century, chemical and aeronautical advances rendered the forts obsolete a short while after their completion. Explosives and aerial bombardment made classical fortifications useless in modern warfare. In 1914, the Battle of Liege, in which the German Army broke through fortifications also designed by Brialmont with greater ease than expected, alarmed the authorities in Bucharest. The forts' artillery pieces—all top-notch Krupp cannons—were quickly dismantled and transformed into mobile artillery. Indeed, by 1916, when the German Army was approaching Bucharest, the forts had already been abandoned, and the city was taken without too much difficulty.

Today, the military has abandoned most of the forts. Stray dogs seek shelter in some of them; storage space and mushroom-growing facilities are other reported uses. During the Communist era, Fort 18 in Chiajna was used as a pickled goods market. However, the military still employs some of the forts, those to the southwest of the city in particular. They serve as firing ranges and munitions deposits, also housing army units; civilians are forbidden entry. The best-known fort is number 13, at Jilava - a military prison from 1907, a feared destination for political prisoners and place of execution during the Communist era, and now still a penitentiary.

The destination of our bike ride was fort 18 and here are some proves of the stories mentioned above.