Târgu Mureș Citadel

The Târgu Mureș Citadel stands in the centre of the city, on Piața Bernády György, north-east of Piața Trandafirilor. It is a pentagonal enclosure with walls of river stone and brick, surrounding the Reformed Church in the Citadel and the buildings of the former Habsburg military command. The medieval citadel ensemble is a class A historic monument (LMI code MS-II-a-A-15475). An earlier fortification stood here, built in 1492 and held by the Voivode of Transylvania Ștefan Báthory. The poet Bálint Balassi was held prisoner here after Prince Ștefan Báthory captured him at the battle of Sânpaul in 1575. The first citadel was destroyed in 1601, during the invasion led by Giorgio Basta. The present citadel was built between 1602 and 1653, and its towers were raised and defended by the town's guilds: the Gate Bastion (1613), the Shoemakers' or Tanners' Bastion and the Báthory Bastion (1620), the Furriers' and Locksmiths' Bastion (1629), the Coopers' Bastion (1632), the Tailors' Bastion (1640) and the Butchers' Bastion (1653). Despite the name, these bastions are in fact artillery towers with three or four levels linked by wooden stairs. On the façade of the Tailors' Bastion a Latin inscription records that the tower was built between 1638 and 1640. The Reformed Church in the Citadel is the oldest building in Târgu Mureș. It was the church of the Franciscan friary, first mentioned in 1332, and was built in several stages in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Its 55 m Gothic tower rises on the north side. During the restoration that began in 2018, a fifteenth-century fresco of King Ladislaus I of Hungary was discovered. The former Habsburg command building grew out of two seventeenth-century houses, the western one serving at the time as the town hall; it took its U-shaped plan in the eighteenth century. Renovated between 2008 and 2014, it now houses the History and Archaeology Section of the Mureș County Museum. Between the church and the museum stands a Baroque fountain, a replica of one that once stood in the town's main square. From 2011 the citadel underwent a large EU-funded rehabilitation project covering the restoration of façades and walls, pedestrian paths and an archaeological park. Since 2018 a bronze model of the citadel with Braille inscriptions has stood next to the museum building. The enclosure is open to pedestrians.