Bucharest in 4 days

Ordered by Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1984 and never quite finished, it razed a fifth of the historic centre and displaced some forty thousand residents.

A monastery church barely larger than a village chapel, completed in 1724, with a Brâncovenesc façade of carved stone columns and painted medallions.

The merchants' quarter, named after traders who stocked up in Leipzig, around the Old Princely Court, where Bucharest was first mentioned in writing in 1459.

In the former royal palace on Calea Victoriei: medieval Romanian icons and church fragments, plus a European gallery with works by El Greco and Rembrandt.

An 1888 domed concert hall paid for by public subscription, 'Give a leu for the Athenaeum', with a 70-metre fresco of Romanian history inside.

Ninety thousand rural objects, from icons on glass to carved gates, shown without explanatory cases, which won European Museum of the Year in 1996.

Peasant houses, churches and mills taken apart across Romania and rebuilt beam by beam beside Lake Herăstrău, opened by sociologist Dimitrie Gusti in 1936.

A 187-hectare park around a lake, renamed King Michael I Park in 2017, with a two-hour loop past writers' busts, roses and boat jetties.