Peleș Castle

Peleș Castle stands at 2 Aleea Peleșului, in the valley of the Peleș stream, in the town of Sinaia, Prahova County. King Carol I first visited the area in August 1866, and in 1871 he bought the land known as Piatra Arsă from the Eforia Spitalelor hospital trust. The first designs, drawn up between 1872 and 1876 by Wilhelm von Doderer, a professor at the Vienna Polytechnic, were rejected by the king. The foundations were laid between 1873 and 1875, and the foundation stone was set on 10/22 August 1875. Johannes Schultz was chief architect from 1876 to 1883, and the castle was officially inaugurated in 1883. From 1894 the work was led by the Czech architect Karel Liman. Later additions included Queen Elisabeth's chapel and the princesses' apartments (1895-1897), the Marble Gallery and the Concert Hall (1903-1906), the Imperial Apartment (1905-1906), the central tower (1906), the Hall of Honour, decorated by Bernhard Ludwig of Vienna (1907-1911), the Arms Halls and the Florentine Hall (1908-1911) and the Council Hall (1911-1914). The building programme ended with the death of Carol I on 27 September 1914. The electrical network was installed in 1884, and the castle's own power station was built in 1897. The castle has about 160 rooms, and the central tower is 66 m high. Peleș was a royal residence from 1883 to 1947. The future King Carol II was born here in 1893, and the Crown Council of 1914, which decided on Romania's neutrality at the start of the First World War, met here. In early 1948 the communist regime closed the castle, inventoried its contents and moved much of the collections elsewhere. It opened as a museum in 1953, was closed between 1975 and 1990, and has been open to the public again since 1990. In 2007 the castle was returned to King Michael I, but the state continues to run it as the Peleș National Museum. The tour includes the Hall of Honour, the Library, the Arms Halls (more than 4,000 European and Oriental pieces from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries), the Music Room, the Florentine Hall, the Moorish Hall, the Theatre Hall and the Concert Hall. Tickets are sold only at bilete.peles.ro and at the museum's ticket machines, and the castle closes for a few weeks each year for cleaning and conservation. The Peleș Castle complex is a class A historic monument (LMI code PH-II-a-A-16696), and the castle itself has the code PH-II-m-A-16696.01.