Ninety seconds on Biertan Fortified Church
This is the one that keeps regular hours, which among the Saxon churches makes it both the safe choice and the crowded one. It also shuts for an hour in the middle of every day, and through the winter it shuts on Mondays as well.
A late gothic hall church of about 1500 on a mound inside three rings of wall, on the UNESCO list, with the most elaborate door lock in Europe and a marriage room where couples intending to divorce were locked in together until they changed their minds.
The approach is a covered wooden staircase of about a hundred metres climbing from the square to the gate, and it is the introduction the building deserves. Inside, the ground opens into two baileys with towers set around them, put up in stages across three centuries, so the defences are not one design but a series of arguments about how to hold a hill. The Mausoleum Tower holds the grave slabs of bishops and priests and is the quietest corner of the site. Ninety minutes covers the church, the towers and a circuit of the walls. Biertan itself was a market town that once rivalled Medias, and it takes ten minutes to walk end to end.
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