Sibiu

Sibiu is the city most people mean when they say Transylvania is easier than they expected. The historic centre is compact, walkable and almost entirely pedestrian, and the layers that make Romania complicated elsewhere — Saxon, Habsburg, Romanian — sit here in plain sight, next to each other, in about fifteen minutes on foot.

What the city actually is

Sibiu was founded in the twelfth century by German settlers who became known as the Transylvanian Saxons. Its German name is Hermannstadt, and it grew into the largest and wealthiest of the seven fortified towns that gave Transylvania its German name, Siebenbürgen — literally, seven citadels.

That history is the reason the centre looks the way it does. The Saxons built for defence and for trade, and the guild wealth paid for the squares, the towers and the merchant houses that survived. The Saxon population left in large numbers in the twentieth century, and what remains is their architecture, occupied by a Romanian city.

The three squares

The old town is organised around three connected squares, and understanding them is most of understanding Sibiu.

Piața Mare, the Great Square, is the largest and the one to arrive in. It was first recorded as a grain market in 1411 and has been the city’s public stage ever since — assemblies, markets, and for centuries the place where things were decided in public. The Brukenthal Palace and the Roman Catholic Holy Trinity Church both face onto it.

Piața Mică, the Little Square, sits immediately alongside and feels domestic by comparison: lower buildings, arcades, cafés. This is where the Bridge of Lies crosses.

Piața Huet holds the Lutheran cathedral and the older, denser part of the citadel. It is the quietest of the three and the one most people walk through without noticing they have changed square.

Brukenthal

The Brukenthal is the oldest museum in Romania, and among the oldest anywhere in Europe. Samuel von Brukenthal was governor of Transylvania under the Habsburgs, and the palace on Piața Mare was built to hold his collection. Its galleries were opened to visitors in 1790, and the museum was formally established in 1817 — which puts the first of those dates a few years ahead of the Louvre opening its doors to the public.

The collection is a genuine European picture gallery rather than a regional museum: several hundred paintings, a library, and the decorative collections of an eighteenth-century governor who bought seriously.

The ASTRA open-air museum

South of the centre, in forest on the edge of the city, ASTRA is one of the largest open-air museums in Europe. Traditional buildings from across Romania — houses, workshops, mills, a church, working water wheels — were dismantled where they stood and rebuilt here, arranged along paths through the trees.

It takes half a day if you walk it properly, and it is the single best answer to the question of what rural Romania looked like before the twentieth century rearranged it. Go in the morning, and expect to be walking on unpaved paths.

The Bridge of Lies

The small iron footbridge between the two lower squares carries the city’s best-known story: that it will not tolerate a lie told while standing on it, and that a proposal made there will not come to anything. It is a short bridge and a long-lived legend, and it is the most photographed object in Sibiu for reasons that have nothing to do with engineering.

Why it works as a base

Most people use Sibiu as a place to sleep while seeing southern Transylvania, and that is the right instinct. The fortified Saxon villages, the Făgăraș mountains and the Transfăgărășan road are all within reach for a day, and the city itself is small enough that returning to it in the evening does not feel like a commute.

Sibiu was European Capital of Culture in 2007, and the restoration that came with it is why the centre is in the condition it is. That is also why it is busier in summer than its size suggests.