Bucharest: Eugeniu Iordachescu, a Romanian civil engineer who devised an ingenious way to save 12 churches and many other historic buildings from being destroyed by the country’s former Communist strongman, has died at 89. He died on Friday from a heart attack and his funeral was being held on Sunday, his daughter-in-law, Ligia Iordachescu. From 1982 to 1988, thousands of buildings were razed in the heart of Bucharest, the Romanian capital, to make way for a plan by then-Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu to build a giant House of the People and Soviet-style apartment buildings.
The urban redesign, systemisation, occurred in Romania, was inspired during Ceausescu’s 1971 visit to North Korea. Dubbed “the guardian angel” of churches, Iordachescu devised a radical system that placed whole buildings— including churches, monasteries, banks and apartment buildings— on the equivalent of railway tracks and rolled them hundreds of metres away to save them from destruction.