St Margaret's Church, Mediaș

St Margaret's Church (Margarethenkirche) is the Lutheran parish church of Mediaș and stands at the centre of the fortified church complex known locally as the „Castelul” (the Castle), at Piața Castelului 1, next to Piața Regele Ferdinand I. Archaeological excavations in 1971-1972 showed that a church stood here as early as the second half of the thirteenth century; it was replaced in the early fifteenth century by an aisleless church with a long nave, parts of which survive in the north aisle. The church is first documented in 1414, under the patronage of St Margaret of Antioch. The present building was probably begun after the Ottoman raid of 1438 and, according to the chronicler Georg Soterius, was completed in 1488. From the mid-fifteenth century a fortified enclosure with walls, a moat and towers was built around the church: the Gate Tower, the School Tower (incorporated into the school building of 1713), the Ropemakers' Tower, St Mary's Tower, with a chapel painted in the early sixteenth century, and the Tailors' Tower. The main tower, the Trumpeters' Tower, was raised by three storeys in the mid-sixteenth century and given four corner turrets, a sign of the town's right to pass death sentences. The added weight made it lean: at a height of 68.5 m its tip deviates by about 2.3 m from the vertical, and its foundations were reinforced in 1927-1930 and again after 1972. A small wooden figure, the „Turepitz”, strikes the hour bell from a niche in the tower. Tradition links the tower to the detention of Vlad the Impaler in 1476. In 1545 the first Lutheran synod of Transylvania met in the church, and the side altars and images were removed, with the frescoes on the north walls whitewashed. These paintings, dated between the late fourteenth century and 1420, were uncovered and partly restored in the 1970s. The high altar, a late Gothic winged altarpiece from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, shows eight Passion panels on its closed side, and the Crucifixion scene includes a view of Vienna. The church also keeps a bronze baptismal font from the last quarter of the fourteenth century, a pulpit canopy carved by Sigismund Möss, tombstones in the choir and one of the largest collections of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Anatolian rugs in Europe. The organ, built in 1755-1756 by Johannes Hahn of Sibiu and restored by Hermann Binder in 1983 and 2005, has 24 stops; the church hosts the annual „Orgelsommer Mediaș” concert season from May to October. In 2022 a collection of printed books, manuscripts and documents from the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries was studied in a room of the Ropemakers' Tower. The fortified church complex is a class A historic monument (LMI code SB-II-a-A-12424), and the church itself has the code SB-II-m-A-12424.01.