Things to do
9-
Casa Georgius Krauss
A patrician house of 1634 inside the citadel walls, restored around its painted beams and vaulted cellar and run as a small hotel. It is one of the few places to sleep inside the walls rather than below them.
-
Casa Vlad Dracul
The ochre house by the clock tower where Vlad Dracul, father of Vlad the Impaler, minted coin and lived in the 1430s. The claim that the son was born in it is tradition rather than record, and the ground floor is now a restaurant.
-
Church on the Hill
The gothic church at the top of the citadel, reached by the covered stair, with fresco fragments uncovered under whitewash and a crypt that is the only one in the country beneath a hill church. The Saxon cemetery around it is still in use.
-
Covered Staircase
A roofed wooden stair of 175 steps built in 1642 so that schoolchildren could reach the hill church in winter without the climb becoming dangerous. It is dim at midday and it is the best photograph in the town.
-
Monastery Church
The former Dominican church on the main square, stripped at the Reformation and now holding a collection of Anatolian rugs and Saxon funerary monuments. The bronze font of 1440 stands near the door.
-
Sighișoara Citadel
The walled upper town, on the UNESCO list since 1999, with about 160 houses still occupied inside the ring. It is entered under the clock tower and crossed in ten minutes, which is not the same as seeing it.
-
Sighișoara Clock Tower
The 64 metre gate tower that has kept the citadel's time since the 1300s, its figures turning on a wooden mechanism at midnight to change the day. The museum inside climbs to a gallery that looks over the whole roofscape.
-
Sighișoara History Museum
The collection in the clock tower covering the guilds, the pharmacy trade and the town's clockmakers, arranged over the tower's floors so that the visit is also the climb.
-
Tanners' Tower
One of the surviving guild towers on the north wall, square and blunt, kept by the tanners who worked down by the river because of the smell. It is the plainest of the nine and the clearest about what a guild tower was for.