Nice evening at Sibiu

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After Timisoara the Motorway continued a bit more. Unfortunately it was not finished completely until Sibiu. We had to go trough the old national roads for approximately 70 km which goes trough all villages and mountains. Just before we arrived to the city Deva, we could use the motorway again. Before dawn we arrived to Sibiu.

We arranged a pension for our stay, which was called “the green house”. Once we arrived there we realized why it was named like that. The house was painted completely green. 

After a short rest we went to the old city center. Sibiu is a medieval and one of the most cultural cities of Romania. In 2007 Sibiu (also known as Hermannstadt) was the European capital of Culture.

We enjoyed or evening on some of the terraces of the many pubs and restaurants on the 3 squares the old town offers.

About Sibiu:

The first official record referring to the Sibiu area comes from 1191, when Pope Celestine III confirmed the existence of the free prepositure of the German settlers in Transylvania, the prepositure having its headquarters in Sibiu, named Cibinium at that time.

In the 14th century, it was already an important trade centre. In 1376, the craftsmen were divided in 19 guilds. Sibiu became the most important ethnic German city among the seven cities that gave Transylvania its German name Siebenbürgen (literally seven citadels). It was home to the Universitas Saxorum (Community of the Saxons), a network of pedagogues, ministers, intellectuals, city officials, and councilmen of the German community forging an ordered legal corpus and political system in Transylvania since the 1400s.During the 18th and 19th centuries, the city became the second- and later the first-most important centre of Transylvanian Romanian ethnics. The first Romanian-owned bank had its headquarters here (The Albina Bank), as did the ASTRA (Transylvanian Association for Romanian Literature and Romanian's People Culture). After the Romanian Orthodox Church was granted status in the Habsburg Empire from the 1860s onwards, Sibiu became the Metropolitan seat, and the city is still regarded as the third-most important centre of the Romanian Orthodox Church. Between the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 and 1867 (the year of the Ausgleich), Sibiu was the meeting-place of the Transylvanian Diet, which had taken its most representative form after the Empire agreed to extend voting rights in the region.

After World War I, when Austria-Hungary was dissolved, Sibiu became part of Romania; the majority of its population was still ethnic German (until 1941) and counted a large Romanian community, as well as a smaller Hungarian one. Starting from the 1950s and until after 1990, most of the city's ethnic Germans emigrated to Germany and Austria. Among the roughly 2,000 who have remained is Klaus Johannis, the current President of Romania.

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