Church on the Hill, Sighișoara

The Church on the Hill (Biserica din Deal) stands on the plateau of School Hill (Schulberg), the highest part of Sighișoara's citadel, next to the Joseph Haltrich High School and the Lutheran cemetery. It is reached from the Citadel Square by the Covered Stairs (Scara Școlarilor). It is a three-aisled Gothic hall church with a bell tower on the west side and was dedicated to St Nicholas until the Reformation. By the mid-twelfth century the hilltop terrace held a Romanesque chapel and a defensive tower. The church and its patron saint are first mentioned in a document of King Louis I of Hungary from 1345. A building inscription on a buttress of the south porch dates the start of the main works to 1429, and another, in the ground floor of the tower, records that the church was completed in 1488 under Jakobus Kendlinger. The north portal, with the arms of Sighișoara and of King Vladislaus II, dates from 1495, and the south portal with its porch from 1525. In 1777 the paintings were whitewashed, and the earthquake of 1838 destroyed the vaults of the chancel and nave. The wall paintings were uncovered in 1934 and during the restoration of the 1990s, funded by the Messerschmitt Foundation. They include angels bearing the instruments of the Passion and St Ursula in the chancel, St George fighting the dragon, St Michael weighing souls and a Last Judgement from the first quarter of the sixteenth century. The interior also holds a Gothic sacrament house, Renaissance tombstones, carved stalls and altars brought from abandoned or endangered Saxon churches, including the main altar of the church in Șaeș, as well as storage chests from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Lutheran Church on the Hill is a historic monument with LMI code MS-II-m-A-15974 and is part of the Historic Centre of Sighișoara, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1999. It belongs to the Lutheran Parish of Sighișoara and operates as a church museum.