Baia Mare Historic Centre

The historic centre of Baia Mare is entered in the List of Historic Monuments (code MM-II-a-A-04432, dated fifteenth to nineteenth centuries) as "the medieval town of Rivulus Dominarum". The protected zone is bounded by Olarilor, Horea, Pintea Viteazul, Andrei Mureșanu, Tineretului, Pietrosului and Rodnei streets and by the Săsar river. The town is first documented in 1329, in a charter of King Charles Robert of Anjou that survives only as a summary in a document of 1479, and the earliest surviving charter of privileges, granted by King Louis I, dates from 20 September 1347. Baia Mare grew in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a gold-mining centre, and its mint is documented in 1411. In 1469 King Matthias Corvinus granted the town the right to surround itself with stone walls. The walls enclosed a roughly circular area, originally divided into five sectors, around the Central Square (Circulus fori), today Piața Libertății. The plots around the square keep the layout of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Central European towns: narrow lots set at right angles to the square, with houses filling the full street frontage and a covered passage leading to an inner courtyard. At number 18 stands the Iancu de Hunedoara House, also called the Elisabeta Szilágyi House, a historic monument dated by the LMI to the late fifteenth to eighteenth centuries and regarded as the oldest civil building in the town. The square also has the Lendvay House, which has carried a plaque to the actor Márton Lendvay since 1881, and the eighteenth-century building at number 6, once owned by the Minorite order. Nearby are Ștefan's Tower, the bell tower of the former St Stephen's church, whose foundations are marked in the paving of the square, the former Mint (now the Maramureș County Museum of History and Archaeology), the Butchers' Bastion, part of the medieval fortifications, and the County Art Museum "Centrul Artistic Baia Mare" at 8 Strada 1 Mai. Rehabilitation of the old centre began in 1993 with an ideas competition for the zonal urban plan. Work started in February 2003 and was completed at the end of 2004, at a cost of 4.3 million euros. Vehicle access from the east was closed and the square became a pedestrian area with café terraces and a fountain.