History

The Saxons of Transylvania — Germans who began settling the region at the invitation of the Hungarian King Géza II around 1150 CE, receiving extensive privileges in exchange for defending and developing the frontier — founded a network of fortified market towns across the region. Sighișoara, known in German as Schässburg and in Latin as Castrum Sex (Six Fortress, referring to the fortification count), was one of the most important. By the late medieval period it was a prosperous craft and trade centre, its population of German-speaking merchants and artisans protected by walls whose towers were each assigned to a specific craft guild for maintenance — a system that explains the towers’ names: the Tailors’ Tower, the Tinkers’ Tower, the Tanners’ Tower, and so on.

In the House of the Deer (Casa cu Cerbi) on the Citadel Hill’s main street, the historical records indicate that Vlad II Dracul — a member of the Order of the Dragon (Societas Draconistarum), a chivalric order founded in 1408 by the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund to defend Christian Europe against Ottoman expansion — fathered a son named Vlad around 1431. This son, Vlad III, became a ruler of Wallachia known to his contemporaries as Vlad Dracula (“son of Dracul”) and later as Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler) for his practice of impaling enemies. His figure, transformed through Gothic literature — principally Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula of 1897, which borrowed the name but set the story in the Borgo Pass of Transylvania rather than in Wallachia — became the template for the vampire count.

The city remained predominantly Saxon in culture until the 20th century. The communist period brought demographic change — industrialisation drew Romanian workers from the countryside — and the post-1989 emigration of the Transylvanian Saxon community to Germany nearly emptied the German-speaking population. Today the Saxons of Sighișoara number only a few hundred, but their architectural legacy — the citadel, the Lutheran Church on the Hill, the school, the tower system — is preserved and functions as a major centre of cultural tourism.