4The Palace of the Parliament, Romania
This huge palace in the capital city of Bucharest was reportedly dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s pet project. The gigantic manse covers an area of almost 3.9 million square feet. After the US Pentagon, this is the world’s second-largest administrative building.
Allegedly, it can even “be seen from the Moon.” They broke ground for this project in 1984, demolishing large areas of the city in the process. What’s worse, literally thousands of construction workers actually died while erecting the building.
Even though Ceaușescu was executed in 1989, work continued and the infamous Palace of Parliament was completed in 1997 at a total expense of $3.9 billion USD in current currency. Now they use just 30 percent of the structure and the utility bills are said to run more than $6 million USD annually. This structure also includes an underground network of rarely explored tunnels featured in an episode of the Brit television program Top Gear. They were originally built specifically for the hard-nosed dictator, who thought he might need an emergency escape route to the local airport if there was ever a revolution.
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