XIII Century Transylvania fortified church

ST. BARTHOLOMEY CHURCH

This church was built in the second half of the XIII century in the north part of Brasov Transylvania. Among those architectonic monuments of Brasov that are still lasting, this edifice is the older. This fortified church was built in the Romanic style, the monument has broken arch windows and vaults on Gothic ogives.

Sprenghi hill where Vlad the Impaler demanded the punishment of all Wallachian refugees from Brașov

The parochial church of the “Ancient Brasov”, located near Sprenghi hill, with the medieval stronghold of refuge, has been rebuilt in the actual form, after the Tartar invasion of 1241.
In 1460 Vlad the Impaler invaded southern Transylvania and destroyed the suburbs of Brașov, ordering the impalement of all men and women who had been captured (around 2000). They were impaled by their nose, to be seen as flags by the people of Brasov that were inside the city. Peace had been restored before 26 July 1460, when Vlad addressed the burghers of Brașov as his "brothers and friends".

The monument adapts the early Gothic architectonic program of the establishments pertaining to the monastic order of the Cistercians monks to a parochial church; it has a basilica-like plan with three aisles in a connected system, transept, and choir with polygonal apse, towered by the chapels of rectangular plan. The sanctuary and its extensions constitute the authentic part of the monument, characterized by the narrow windows in broken arch surmounted by circular poly-lobe rosaries and by the carved stone specific to the Cistercian architecture.

Outside, the cornice conserves a continuous frieze of blind arcades on consoles, an architectural motive of an older Romanic tradition.
The destructions caused by the Ottoman attacks of 1421 and 1438 determined the vaults of the aisles and the transept to be rebuilt; the actual aspect of the church also is tributary to the reconstruction works carried on in 1634-1663. On the western side of the basilica-like corpus, there were designed two towers, of which only the south-western one has been accomplished, dating back to its actual form since 1842.

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