Vișeu de Sus

Vișeu de Sus lies in the depression of the Land of Maramureș, at the confluence of the Vișeu and Vaser rivers, 427 m above sea level, between the Maramureș Mountains to the north and north-east and the Rodna Mountains to the south-east. The town comprises Vișeu de Sus and Vișeu de Mijloc, holds the status of a tourist resort of national interest and had 15,349 inhabitants at the 2021 census. Most authors date its first documentary mention to 2 February 1365, as Ketwyssou, in a charter of King Louis of Anjou. The present town grew after 1770, when forestry centres were founded at Vișeu and Borșa. From 1743 miners from Saxony settled here, and from the 1770s German settlers from Zips, Austria (Salzburg, Tyrol, Salzkammergut) and Bavaria, known as Zipsers. They formed the Țipțerai quarter and built the dams used for timber rafting and the first sawmill, in 1809. At the 1930 census, of 11,079 inhabitants, 3,722 were Jews, 3,616 Romanians and 2,753 Germans. Listed historic monuments include the Annunciation church of 1842 (LMI code MM-II-m-A-04801) and its parish house, the Roman Catholic church "Ioan și Ana" (LMI code MM-II-m-A-04799), the eighteenth-century Jewish cemetery (LMI code MM-II-s-B-04796), the former house and estate office of Pop Simion, now the town hall, and the former "Irina" public hospital. The town also has a Museum of History and Ethnography. From the town's CFF station departs the Mocănița, the narrow-gauge forestry railway of the Vaser valley, a historic monument (LMI code MM-II-a-B-21017), with steam-hauled tourist trains to Paltin. In the Vaser valley, at the confluence with the Miraj stream about 5 km upstream of the town, lies the German military cemetery laid out in 1917, where 105 soldiers who fell in the First World War were reburied; in 2011 an Orthodox triptych was raised there in memory of all the soldiers who died in the valley.