Peleș Castle

King Carol I of Romania (1839–1914), under whose reign the country gained its independence, first visited the site of the future castle in 1866 and fell for the mountain scenery. In 1872 the Crown purchased 5 square kilometres of land near the Piatra Arsă River, northwest of the town of Sinaia in the southeastern Carpathians, on an existing medieval route linking Transylvania and Wallachia. The holding was named the Royal Estate of Sinaia, and the King commissioned a royal hunting preserve and summer retreat on it. The foundation of Peleș was laid on 22 August 1873.

Several auxiliary buildings went up alongside the castle: the guards' chambers, the Economat Building, the Foișor hunting lodge, the royal stables and a power plant. Peleș became the world's first castle fully powered by locally produced electricity. The complex that grew on the estate is made up of three monuments, Peleș itself, Pelișor Castle and the Foișor lodge.

The first three design plans submitted for Peleș were copies of other palaces in Western Europe, and Carol I rejected them all as lacking originality and being too costly. The German architect Johannes Schultz won the project with a more original scheme that suited the King's taste: a grand palatial alpine castle combining features of classic European styles, mostly following Italian elegance and German aesthetics along Renaissance lines. Works were also led by the architect Carol Benesch, and the earliest phase, from 1873 to 1876, is credited to Carl Wilhelm Christian von Doderer. Between 1893 and 1914 the Czech architect Karel Liman made the later additions, designing the towers including the main central tower, 66 metres high; the Sipot Building, which served as his headquarters during the works, was put up afterwards. Liman went on to supervise nearby Pelișor Castle (1889–1903), the future residence of King Ferdinand I and Queen Marie, as well as Ferdinand's villa in the Royal Sheepfold Meadow. Carol I and Queen Elisabeth lived in Foișor Villa while Peleș was building, as Ferdinand and Marie did during the construction of Pelișor. Princess Maria died on the estate in 1874.

The cost of the work undertaken between 1875 and 1914 was estimated at 16,000,000 Romanian lei in gold, and between three and four hundred men worked on the site. Queen Elisabeth kept a journal of it: "Italians were masons, Romanians were building terraces… Albanians and Greeks worked in stone, Germans and Hungarians were carpenters. Turks were burning brick. Engineers were Polish and the stone carvers were Czech. The Frenchmen were drawing, the Englishmen were measuring." She counted hundreds of national costumes and fourteen languages spoken, sung and quarrelled in among the men, horses, cart oxen and buffaloes. Construction slowed during the Romanian War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire in 1877–1878, but soon afterwards the plans grew in size and the building went up quickly.

The interiors ran on long after the castle was in use. The Hall of Honour, which spreads over three floors, was finished only in 1911 under Liman's guidance, and holds the Ancestors Gallery, a set of paintings commissioned by Carol from the "Künstler-Compagnie" depicting the ancestors of the House of Hohenzollern. The architectural decoration and mural paintings of the sixty-seat Playhouse are signed by Gustav Klimt and Franz Matsch.

On the 1883 inaugural journey of the Orient Express to Bucharest, passengers from Paris were invited to Peleș by Queen Elisabeth of Wied while Carol I ceremoniously put the last brick in place to mark the castle's completion. The invitation was part of the Queen's effort to promote Peleș and the Romanian Carpathians to a broader audience. The official Royal Ball of Inauguration was held on 7 October 1883.

Carol II was born at the castle in 1893, giving meaning to the phrase "cradle of the dynasty, cradle of the nation" that Carol I bestowed on Peleș. Kaiser Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary came on 2 October 1896 and afterwards wrote of a castle "very impressive through the riches it has accumulated: old and new canvases, old furniture, weapons, all sort of curious, everything placed with good taste", of a long hike in the mountains and a picnic on the grass. The Imperial Suite is believed to be a tribute to him, which is why the decorator Auguste Bembe worked it in the sumptuous Austrian Baroque of Empress Maria Theresa's day.

The Italian writer Angelo de Gubernatis (1840–1913), who arrived in Sinaia in 1898 as a guest of the royal family, recorded that the castle "is not only a pleasant place during summer time; it has been conceived to be also a national monument, meant to keep the trophies of the Plevna victory, which explains the simple but majestic style". The King added to the collection pieces used in his victory against the Ottoman Turks during the War of Independence, and the Grand Armory holds 1,600 of the castle's 4,000 pieces of weaponry and armour, a collection spreading over four centuries. George Enescu, Sarah Bernhardt, Jacques Thibaud and Vasile Alecsandri visited often as guests of Queen Elisabeth, herself a writer under the pen name Carmen Sylva. In more recent times Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Muammar al-Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat were among the foreign dignitaries welcomed at the castle.

After the forced abdication of King Michael I in 1947, Communist Romania seized all royal property, the Peleș Estate included. The castle was opened as a tourist attraction for a short time and also served as a recreation and resting place for Romanian cultural personalities. It was declared a museum in 1953.

Nicolae Ceaușescu closed the entire estate between 1975 and 1990, in the last years of the Communist regime. The area was declared a "State Protocol Interest Area", and the only persons permitted on the property were maintenance and military personnel. Ceaușescu did not like the castle very much and rarely visited. In the 1980s some of the timber was found to be infested with Serpula lacrymans. After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Peleș and Pelișor were re-established as heritage sites and opened to the public.

In 2006 the Romanian government announced the restitution of the Royal Domain, with all the properties and land within it, to the former monarch King Michael I; negotiations between the king and the government began soon after and were concluded in 2007. The castle's own return to the royal family is dated to 1997 by some accounts and to that later restitution by others; both put the end of the long judicial case in 2007. The castle is on lease from the royal family to the Romanian state, and Michael I said it should continue to house the Peleș National Museum as well as being used occasionally for public royal ceremonies. It is protected as a Historic Monument and receives between a quarter and almost half a million visitors a year, admitted on guided tours, with visiting hours subject to change by the Romanian Ministry of Culture, and closed each November for maintenance and cleaning. On the wider estate, Foișor now serves as a presidential residence, while the Economat Building and the Guard's Chambers have become hotels and restaurants.

The castle's owner is Michael I's heir Margareta, Custodian of the Romanian Crown, who occasionally uses it for receptions, investitures and other public events. On Monarchy Day, 10 May 2016, the royal family hosted a large reception, garden party and concert to mark the 150th anniversary of the Romanian Royal Dynasty, and Margareta's standard was flown from Peleș, the first time a royal standard had flown from the castle since 1947. In August 2016 the body of Queen Anne lay in state in the Hall of Honour, in a ceremony attended by the Romanian president Klaus Iohannis, the Moldovan president Nicolae Timofti and Prime Minister Dacian Cioloș. On 13 December 2017 King Michael I lay in state in the same location, in a similar but larger ceremony, before his state funeral in Bucharest and burial at Curtea de Argeș Cathedral.