Between 1982 and 1988 almost a dozen churches, as well as other buildings, were moved hundreds of metres in order to save them from destruction, as dictator Nicolae Ceaușescuwent about radically redesigning the heart of Bucharest, the Romanian capital.

That a communist country would go out of its way to save churches is strange enough, but the method of saving them, when other countries would probably have tried to dismantle the buildings and reassemble them elsewhere, makes the achievement all the more impressive. ... At the centre of it all was Eugeniu Iordăchescu, a civil engineer who had the radical idea to place whole buildings on the equivalent of railway tracks and roll them to safety.

“I was in the area that was to be knocked down and I saw a beautiful small church and started wondering how it was possible to demolish such a jewel,” says the sprightly 87-year-old, sitting in his dining room in a nondescript apartment in Bucharest, a few miles from where the churches he saved three decades ago still stand. “I thought about the idea of moving it.”

At that time 30,000 residents were being forced from their homes, with an entire district of historical Bucharest, roughly 9,000 houses as well as churches, synagogues and other buildings demolished to make way for Ceaușescu’s grandiose vanity project, the Palace of the People and surrounding civic centre. 

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Ultimately a process was developed whereby the ground was dug out from under the churches, with a large reinforced concrete support created and the foundations severed. Tracks were laid, and hydraulic levers and industrial pulleys were used to slowly move the buildings to their new locations, often at a few metres an hour.

One church would require a team of around five engineers for the planning phases, and then upwards of 20 workers when the physical work was under way. ... The first church to be moved, the 18th-century Schitul Maicilor, weighing 745 tonnes, was relocated 245 metres away from its original site in 1982. The whole project took five months – though the actual process of moving the structures would often take just a few days. ... As time went on the team got more and more ambitious, with the 16th-century Mihai Voda Church being moved in tandem with its standalone tower. The largest church that was moved, technically a monastery, weighed 9,000 tonnes. It was shifted 24 metres from its original location.

In Bucharest and other cities, Iordăchescu and his colleagues moved a hospital and a bank – and even entire apartment buildings, often with the water and gas lines still attached and the people still inside them. “One building, people inside thought the move would start at 9am so they prepared their luggage, with their papers, valuables, but we started at 6am, so at 9am when they went to leave it had already moved a couple of metres,” says Iordăchescu, showing me an old photograph of himself standing on the balcony of a moving building.