Historic Centre of Sighișoara
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How it came to be
Sighișoara is a town on the Târnava Mare River in Transylvania, central Romania. From the mid-12th century King Géza II of Hungary invited German craftsmen and merchants, known as the Transylvanian Saxons, to settle and defend the frontier and improve the region's economy. A Saxon settlement is recorded here by 1191, and a document of 1280 names the town, built on the site of a Roman fort, Castrum Sex, the six-sided camp.
By 1337 it had become a royal centre, and it received urban status in 1367. The walls around the old town were built between the 14th and 17th centuries against Turkish attacks, and nine of their fourteen towers survive. Each tower served as the headquarters of a craft guild, and in the 16th and 17th centuries the town is estimated to have had 15 guilds and 20 branches of handicraft.
Vlad Dracul, voivode of Wallachia and father of Vlad the Impaler, lived here in exile and had coins minted in the town. The Romanian name Sighișoara is first attested in 1435 and derives from the Hungarian Segesvár. In 1999 the town was inscribed as a World Heritage site, a small fortified medieval town that for centuries played a strategic and commercial role on the fringes of central Europe.
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