Piața Mică (Small Square), Sibiu

Piața Mică lies in the Upper Town, north of the Large Square (Piața Mare), to which it is linked by the passage under the Council Tower. To the west it backs onto Huet Square and the Evangelical Cathedral. Ocnei Street cuts through the square and descends to the Lower Town beneath the Bridge of Lies (1859), the cast iron footbridge that links the two halves of the square and Huet Square. Until the middle of the nineteenth century the square was split in two by a row of houses with a tunnel running under them; the houses were demolished in 1851 and the tunnel was opened up. The shape of the square follows the old fortified enclosures. The houses at numbers 6-15 have double addresses, on Piața Mică and on Huet Square, and stand on the line of the first enclosure (1191-1224), a fragment of which survives inside the house at number 13. The houses at numbers 19-30 were built on the wall of the second enclosure (1224-1241): number 24 preserves the Goldsmiths' Stair Tower, and number 23 a tower of the third enclosure. The List of Historic Monuments dates most houses to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with eighteenth-century alterations, and almost every building around the square is a listed monument. Number 21 is the former Butchers' Hall, from the fourteenth century, now the House of Arts, and number 26 is the house of the „La Ursul Negru” (Black Bear) pharmacy, home to the Museum of Pharmacy History. The neo-Gothic building at number 11, built in 1865-1867 for the Association of Small Craftsmen and renamed the Hermes House after the war, has housed the „Franz Binder” Museum of World Ethnography of the ASTRA Museum Complex since 1993. Number 12 houses the Astra Film Studio, number 16 the Luxembourg Cultural Centre, and number 25 is the former Goldsmiths' Guild House. The buildings at numbers 3-5 also face the Large Square: the former Jesuit Seminary, the Roman Catholic Holy Trinity Church and the City Hall building (the former Land Credit Bank, 1906). The square is pedestrian and part of the historic centre. In 2007 Sibiu's first Christmas market was held here before moving to the Large Square. Ocnei Street leads down to the Lower Town, and the stairway next to the Goldsmiths' Stair Tower leads to Goldsmiths' Square.