Bucharest is Romania’s capital city and has a population of around 1.8 million people. It’s a city full of unique history, architecture inspired by both Western Europe and North Korea, and water fountains. From 1965-1989, the country underwent increasing hardships under the leadership of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who became so obsessed with repaying the national debt that he banned all imports in the early 1980s, which caused most of the country to starve. By this time Romanian citizens already lived in what was essentially a totalitarian police state no different to that of Albania under Enver Hoxha. In 1985, Ceaușescu had several acres of a Bucharest neighborhood razed to the ground so that construction could begin on one of the biggest vanity projects in history, the gigantic Presidential Palace.

It is estimated that, in total, approximately one million people worked around the clock over the next four years in what was to become the world’s heaviest building. Ceaușescu didn’t get to enjoy his megalomaniacal mansion for long, though. In December, protests broke out in the western city of Timișoara while he was in Iran, and upon his return was then met by thousands of angry citizens. He and his wife Elena were arrested on December 22nd by the military for corruption and put on trial three days later. On Christmas day, both were found guilty and executed hours later.

Ceaușescu was the only leader in the Eastern Bloc to have been executed during the fall of communism.