Turda History Museum

The Turda History Museum is at 2 Bogdan Petriceicu Hașdeu Street, in the historic centre of Turda, next to the Old Turda Reformed Church. It occupies the building known as the Princely Palace ("Voivodal Palace" in the List of Historic Monuments), also called the Salt Chamber or the Báthory House. The building keeps parts from the late 15th and early 16th centuries and was largely rebuilt by around 1588. It was one of the residences of the princes of Transylvania, among them Sigismund Báthory, and hosted several Transylvanian Diets, the last in 1799. Its architecture is essentially Gothic, with Renaissance elements. The museum was founded in 1943 and opened in 1951 on the initiative of Augustin Rațiu, with the help of the historian Ioan I. Russu. The museum holds about 40,000 items, arranged in prehistoric, Roman and post-Roman, medieval-modern and memorial, ethnographic and art collections. The permanent exhibitions cover the prehistoric village, the ceramics industry, the town of Potaissa and the fortress, and Turda between the medieval and modern periods. Sarcophagi and other pieces of the Roman lapidarium were moved into the museum courtyard in 2013 for protection. The museum also manages the fortress of Legio V Macedonica and an ethnographic section, with a combined ticket for all three. In September 2026 the city hall put before the Turda Local Council a plan to move the medieval, modern and contemporary, art and old book collections to the new Centre for Culture, Art and Traditions at 5 Piața Republicii; the archaeological collections are not part of the transfer. The building is a historic monument of national importance (LMI CJ-II-m-A-07794). The museum is a public institution run by the Turda Local Council. Did you know that, according to the museum, its Roman displays include probably the best-preserved piece of chain mail from the former Roman Empire? Visitors can also see bronze scale weights inlaid with silver letters.