Țepeș Castle, Bucharest

The water tower "Cetatea lui Țepeș Vodă", commonly known under the name of the Vlad Țepeș Castle in Bucharest, is a building raised in 1906 in Carol I Park on the occasion of the organisation of the Romanian General Exhibition dedicated to the completion of 40 years since the accession to the throne of King Carol I of Romania, 25 years since the proclamation of the Kingdom of Romania and 1,800 years since the conquest of Dacia by the Romans.

The building, with its entrance on General Candiano Popescu street, at number 6, executed after the plans of the architect Scarlat Petculescu (according to other sources, in accordance with the plans drawn up by Ștefan Burcuș, V. G. Ștefănescu, I. Berindei), reproduces, on a smaller scale than the original, Poenari Fortress, raised by Vlad Țepeș, ruler of Wallachia, at the place called Cheia Argeșului, in Plaiul Loviștei, Argeș County.

The architects who dealt with the layout of the exhibition provided, in the left-hand part of the park, a water tower which the firefighters were to have at their disposal to ensure a prompt intervention in case of fire. The fire station was placed in the dominant area of the hill so as to ensure permanent visual surveillance by day and by night, accommodation for the firefighters and for the depot with intervention equipment, as well as the large water reservoir.

Since the shape of the water tower's reservoirs was not an aesthetic one, the solution was adopted of including them in a construction that would meet the requirements of the exhibition's organisers. Thus it was decided to include the reservoir in a construction of historic appearance. Initially, in the castle's tower, 23 metres high and with a diameter of 9 metres, a cast-iron reservoir with a capacity of 200 m³ was mounted. The basin was cast in the workshops of Oscar Maller and was mounted inside the tower of the fortress.

Machine-translated from “Turnul de apă „Cetatea lui Țepeș Vodă”” on the Romanian Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Țepeș Castle, Bucharest ranks #6,994 of 8,134 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #75 of the 121 mapped in Romania. 9 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. The nearest day-trip guide is Bucharest, 1 km away. See how Romania compares in the castle statistics.

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Read the full history on Wikipedia (in Romanian) ↗