In the village of Hășdat in the heart of rural Romania, geese roam the dusty streets, bonfires burn in back gardens, and the houses are not quite what you would expect. Not at all. One sports a pair of golden Versace Medusa heads and Rolex crown emblems on its tall metal gates, flanked by marble pillars topped with trios of cherubs. They mark the entrance to a compound where a creamy stuccoed pile groans with balconies and plaster mouldings, its roof dripping with ornamental guttering. A group of women stand around a table in its courtyard, plucking feathers from freshly slaughtered chickens behind a fence of gilded scrollwork.
Across the street, the neighbours have gone even further. A shoal of metal fish surmount the four-tiered pagoda roof of this five-storey mansion, where gold-painted columns glitter on either side of bulging mirror-glass doors. A bright blue Ford Mustang is parked in the forecourt next to an Audi and the discarded box for a widescreen TV. Two girls in matching velour tracksuits and gold jewellery race in circles on their scooters.
Welcome to the palaces of the Roma kings: exuberant monuments of wealth, pride and prestige, and defiant expressions of cultural identity in a country that has turned its back on the community for so long. Across Romania, similar outcrops of ostentatious mansions have sprouted in the most unlikely places over the last two decades, competing for attention with ever more elaborate rooftops, taller turrets, bigger porches and shinier fixtures. They revel in exuberant mashups of architectural motifs, sampling from Ottoman, Byzantine and neoclassical traditions, with a hefty dollop of Las Vegas glitz. And it’s fair to say that most people in Romania don’t see them as a particularly welcome addition to the landscape.
“We are taught to hate anything that doesn’t follow the rules,” says Laurian Ghinițoiu, a Romanian photographer who has been documenting these palaces in far-flung corners of the country for five years. “Our society is completely racist towards the Roma community, so these buildings are often dismissed as kitsch and bad taste. But nowhere else in recent years can you find a style of architecture so closely associated with an ethnic group, which embodies their desire to be visible and get back their self-esteem.”
Ghinițoiu’s arresting photographs are currently on show at the Timișoara architecture biennale, curated this year by Oana Stănescu around the theme of “covers”, taking in a broad spectrum of architectural copying, sampling and remixing, and held in the city’s atmospheric crumbling former garrison, set to become the Museum of the Revolution, which feels like a fitting place to display these acts of architectural rebellion. Hung in traditional picture frames gathered from flea markets, Ghinițoiu’s images paint a loving portrait of a community that isn’t ashamed to have fun with its decor.
There are frenzied geometric-tiled facades echoing the patterns of Romani fabrics, and dazzling chequerboard interiors recalling scenes from Beetlejuice. Pointed rooftops shimmer with metallic fish-scale shingles, crowned with symphonies of ornamental ironmongery. They look like stacks of tinfoil tiaras, reaching ever higher towards the skies. There’s a mansion with a gigantic golden dome, loosely modelled on the US Capitol in Washington DC. “The owner told me it was inspired by the back of the $50 bill,” says Ghinițoiu. “He didn’t know what the building was, but to him it represented power and wealth.”
It’s not hard to see why some successful Roma families are so keen to show off their new-found riches. Originally hailing from northern India, this nomadic ethnic group arrived in Romania in the 14th century, and were immediately enslaved by the Orthodox church and the landed nobility in a system of brutal exploitation that continued for 500 years. When slavery was finally abolished in 1856, the 250,000 Roma slaves – around 7% of the Romanian population at the time – received no reparations, while their abusers were handsomely compensated.
The following century saw a similar number of Roma murdered by the Nazis, while the postwar communist government of Romania enforced their settlement in the 1960s and 70s, outlawed their traditional trades and dispersed families around the country. “They had left their homeland to find a better life,” says Ghinițoiu, “only to end up in Romania, where they faced the same persecution and the same inhuman treatment.”
After the fall in 1989 of communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu – who himself had a ravenous penchant for bling-laden palaces – the Roma enjoyed newfound freedom. Some became wealthy overnight from the return of gold that had been confiscated by the communists. Others did well out of the scrap metal trade, or found work overseas, or prospered from the grey areas of the emerging market economy. The palaces stand as literal representations of various families’ rise to wealth; teetering trophies of their triumph against the odds and a gaudy rebuke to a society that suppressed them for so long. Their tumultuous stories are sometimes referenced in the architecture itself.
On a prominent corner of the main street in Buzescu, two hours’ drive southwest from Bucharest, stands a house that has the neoclassical look of a town hall. Sturdy white columns march along its two-storey frontage, beneath a pediment emblazoned with the name of its owner, Dan Finuțu.
“It is the most important building in our beautiful Buzescu,” one local resident tells me, breaking off from a wedding parade which is cavorting down the street to the sound of a lively manele band. Finuțu, it turns out, was a prominent and wealthy member of the Roma community who was jailed for fraud in the 1990s. As he was sentenced, he vowed to build a mansion modelled on the very courthouse where he was convicted. He was a man of his word: this stately doppelgänger was completed in 2003. Finuțu and his wife were killed in a car crash in 2012, and their bodies now rest in a mausoleum on the edge of town designed in the form of another smaller version of the courthouse – an architectural middle finger from beyond the grave.
Back in Hășdat, I find a creamy mansion whose three-tiered, red-tiled roof is crowned with a metalwork sign that reads: “Vila British.” It is the home of Puiu Englezu, who made his fortune in Croydon, according to his neighbour. He is locally renowned for his gold accessories, including a necktie made of gold links, and the gigantic twin palaces he built for his sons, Codruţ and Rambo. Their interiors look like something from a Harrods fever dream, swelling with swagged curtains, ceramic chandeliers and gilded thrones, flanked by gold statues of tigers. Luxury cars with British numberplates throng the forecourt in summertime.
“These homes are all about pakiv, the Romani idea of social capital,” says Rudolf Gräf, author of a book about the palace phenomenon. “They attract respect for a person who was able to deal so successfully with the outside world, which is a sign of achievement for this relatively closed community. A house like this is the ultimate proof of success.” Exotic worldly symbols are used alongside logos of luxury brands to signify success overseas. In the town of Haţeg, near Hășdat, there is a two-metre model of the Eiffel Tower on one rooftop – to which the neighbours responded by erecting a model of the Statue of Liberty on theirs.
These palaces are not homes as we conventionally know them but supersized objects that serve a ritualistic role. They represent the core institution of the clan, a place to host special events such as weddings, funerals and family parties. Their owners don’t usually live in them and, despite their immense size, they rarely contain kitchens or bathrooms. Day-to-day domestic functions mostly take place in smaller buildings around the back. “The Roma observe a strict separation of vujo and marime,” says Gräf, meaning clean and dirty. “These are sacred spaces, like a church, so they shouldn’t be contaminated by toilets or dirty water. We might be used to bathroom plumbing, but for them it’s weird having [that] running through your walls.”
Ghinițoiu’s photographs show interiors as immaculate stage sets; empty backdrops awaiting the next celebration. One shows a bright white entrance hall flanked by a grand, double-curved staircase on either side. But there is no balustrade on these perilous steps, and they don’t seem to lead anywhere beyond an unusable mezzanine decorated with vases and classical statues.
Another image shows the sanctified chamber of a dowry room, where the bride’s haul of embroidered fabrics is kept safely in cupboards. “The family of the bride provides the dowry,” says Ghinițoiu “and the family of the groom builds the house.” More than a home, these palaces serve as a means of alliance-building between families, and act as symbolic vessels for the storage of the dowry: high-rise treasure chests clad in mouldings and mirrored glass.
Buzescu’s main street reads like a bar-chart of familial oneupmanship, lined on either side with ever more outrageous confections. There are rooftops crowned with spiked metal balls, as if plucked from the end of a medieval mace, others that conjure witches’ cottages or castle turrets. And there are plenty more where the money appears to have abruptly run out, leaving empty shells of unplastered blockwork and raw concrete porticos; Ozymandian relics of architectural hubris that dared to dream too big.
“My feeling is we have reached the end of the boom period,” says Gräf, “and that wealth will now be spent on other things. Some families told me they had spent a lot of money on building a house, but their kids didn’t know how to do anything because they had spoiled them so much. In hindsight, they thought it might have been more important to send them to school.”
Whatever their future, these fantastical palaces stand as bold, brash monuments to hastily accrued riches, symbols of a moment when a formerly nomadic group – with no history of erecting permanent buildings – decided to go all out and make their mark.
• Cover Me Softly, the Timișoara architecture biennale, ends on 27 October.
