Slimnic Citadel

Slimnic Citadel, Stolzenburg in German, stands on the hill that dominates the southern part of Slimnic, the seat of the commune of the same name, on the DN14 road about 18 km north of Sibiu. The village, first documented in 1282, lay on the northern border of the King's Land and belonged to the Sibiu Seat, and the fortress guarded the road between Sibiu and Mediaș. The citadel runs north to south along the whole length of the hill and consists of two polygonal enclosures. The oldest part is a Gothic chapel with a polygonal choir, above which rises a three-storey bell tower. The walls were rebuilt at the beginning of the fifteenth century, mainly in brick, and the tower of the northern enclosure has walls about 3.5 m thick. Around 1450 a Gothic hall church with a trapezoidal plan was begun across the width of the citadel, but it was never completed. Its south wall, with pointed arcades on two levels, survives, as does the west wall, with pointed windows and machicolations. Access was through a tunnel under the choir of the church, leading to the southern courtyard and a courtyard with a well (zwinger). In 1529 the citadel was taken by the army of John Zápolya and recaptured the same year by the villagers with help from Sibiu. In 1658 it withstood an Ottoman siege. During the Kuruc uprising the village was burned in 1704 and the citadel was occupied in 1706-1707; when they left, the Kuruc troops set it on fire, destroying the southern enclosure and the Gothic church. A renovation begun in 1717 was halted in 1719 by a plague epidemic. In 1855 part of the church was demolished to build the cemetery wall, and sections of wall collapsed in 1870 and 1872. In 1958-1959 the bell tower, the walls and the north-west defensive tower were consolidated. The complex, with its fortified enclosure, towers, chapel, gate tower, bastion and annexes, is a class A historic monument (LMI code SB-II-m-A-12552), dated to the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries. The citadel is a ruin, reached from Slimnic village.