If you’re in London, the King’s Road is where you go for fashion boutiques and to hang out with the wealthy Chelsea set. If you’re in Romania, the King’s Road is a little different. It’s a long stretch of tarmac that crosses a barren mountainscape, home to donkeys and stray dogs. The one thing that the two King’s Roads have in common is that the people who live there frequently compare it to hell.
When it was created, however, the Romanian road was considered a remarkable engineering feat that was given royal assent by the country’s penultimate monarch, King Carol II, in the 1930s. Fuelled by post-war anxiety, he sought to modernise a well-used thoroughfare to provide a strategic link across the Carpathian Mountains, which had long sliced the country in two. To assess the job, the King sent his Prime Minister, Gheorghe Tătărușcu, plus 20 horsemen to scout the 150km journey from Novaci to the south of the Carpathians to the Lotru River on the north.