Ninety seconds on Criț Fortified Church
The door is locked and the keyholder's telephone number is posted on it, which is the normal arrangement for a Saxon village church and the reason most people drive past this one without stopping.
A church with a broad hall and a wall of family cells in a village that has kept its Saxon plan almost complete. The village has become a base for horse and cart routes across the Târnava plateau.
Whether there is a visit at all turns on a telephone call. The number on the door reaches somebody in the village who comes down to open up, and the waiting is the unpredictable part, with nowhere in particular to spend it. Once the door is open, three quarters of an hour covers the interior and a circuit inside the walls. The scale is domestic after Biertan: one defence wall, five towers, and a building meant for a few hundred people. Nobody is selling anything here and there is no desk to be disappointed by, which is either the appeal or the problem depending on the afternoon. The church stands in Crit itself, a separate Saxon village and not a part of Viscri; Viscri is simply the base most visitors reach it from.
The church standing here now is not the fortified one. The medieval building was pulled down in 1810 and replaced, while the defences around it were left where they stood: a wall and five towers raised in the fifteenth century, when this was a frontier worth holding. What a visitor walks into is a nineteenth-century church inside a medieval shell.
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