The Fortified Church of Sfântu Gheorghe

In the north-western part of Sfântu Gheorghe, the Reformed Fortified Church watches over the city from the high ground above Kálvin Square. The church was built in the late Gothic style in the 15th-16th centuries and took its present form in 1547, with the patron Pál Daczó as its builder. It was once surrounded by a high double fortified wall, with a tower on one of its two bastions. The outer fortified wall was demolished by the parish in 1786, and the stones were used to build a one-storey building intended for the "German school" by order of King Joseph II, which today serves as a prayer room and bell-ringers' dwelling. The predecessor of today's Reformed Székely Mikó College started its operation there in 1859.

The main jewel of the church's interior is the stone-lined net vault of the sanctuary, with partly carved corbels and characterful male figures along with the coat of arms. The door frame of the southern entrance is one of the most beautiful early Renaissance monuments in Transylvania. 

The former gate tower of the fortified wall is covered by a baroque onion-shaped roof, and nowadays it serves as a bell tower.

The churchyard is also the resting place of several important figures in the town's history: pastors, Mayor Bálint Császár, József Málik, headmaster and superintendent of the public school, Ferenc Gödri, mayor and superintendent, and the memorials of the executed freedom fighters József Váradi and Ferenc Bartalis. There are also the mass graves of the hundreds of victims of the Turkish-Tatar massacres of 1658 and 1661. A headstone monument was erected in their memory in 1975.

Samu Csinta