These large domed buildings were, in the communist era, officially known as "agro-alimentary complexes." They were intended as produce markets and public refectories. It appears to have been Ceauşescu's vision that these would become the only places in Romania where food was sold or distributed, and that the refectories would make it possible to construct future apartments without kitchens.
The name "hunger circuses," now so universally used as to have almost suppressed the memory of the official communist-era term, derived from the irony of constructing these massive food-related buildings during a period when food was scarce throughout Romania.
At the time of Ceauşescu's downfall and execution, only two hunger circuses had been completed: one of these, Pantelimon, now forms part of a public market in the Delfinului area of Bucharest; the other, also in Bucharest, forms part of the Unirea shopping mall, nestled between Lipscani and the Centru Civic. Many others sit half-finished in scattered locations around Bucharest, surrounded by rusting construction cranes and vacant lots, now little more than meeting points for the glue-sniffers known as "aurolaci" ("Aurolac" is the most glue product sold in Romania that is used for sniffing because is cheap and its selling unrestricted).
With transcendant irony, one hunger circus left unfinished in 1989 was later completed, under a revised architectural plan, as the eminently capitalist Bucharest Mall.