Fagaras Fortress

About Fagaras Fortress

Fagaras Fortress Museum “Valer Literat” is is a complex historical and ethnographic museum representative of Romania, which was established since 1923 based on the patrimony collected by by Professor Valer Literat under ASTRA.
From the beginning, the Museum carries on an ongoing historical and ethnographic research area, enrichment, conservation and scientific capitalization of its patrimony.
The museum (history, ehnography, art) contains a total of 20 collections (archeology, weapons, coins, documents, glass factory, plastic and decorative aart, folk costumes, glass icons, etc.) and tells the history of Fagaras in a sequence of moments and significant events.

The museum works in the Fagaras Fortress, the most imposing monument of the area whose construction began in the late sixteenth century and continued until the middle of the seventeenth century and was preceded by a wooden fortress surrounded by a moat and a rampart, dated in the twelfth century.

In the XVth century, the stone fortress, with a quadrangular enclosure with four corner towers and a bastion tower, was a military fortification that corresponded with the western fortification system introduced in Transylvania since the fourteenth century.
The sixteenth century brings the most significant changes occurred in the architecture of the fortress that will transform it into a castle with a strong outer fortification.
In the XVIIth century, architectural transformations – the construction of bastions, stylistic and artistic changes, arrangement of the trench - set the current form of the fortress.
Attacked numerous times, Fagaras Fortress, with a cohesive defensive system, was never conquered.
After 1696, the fortress became the Austrian army garrison, then Hungarian, Romanian army garrison, and from 1948 to 1960 was converted into a communist prison.