The land of fortified churches

If we fast forward from the previous wooden church in Hunedoara county to town of Sebeș in Alba county (both of them in Transylvania), we start seeing more Protestant churches (of which fortified churches are a local specialty). This is the Protestant graveyard.

All the fortified churches #acrossRomania were built by Saxons, who initially came to Transylvania to defend the borders of the Holy Roman Empire (German empire from back in the day) from the East in the 13th century and they kept coming throughout later centuries as well.

As all the empires ultimately fell apart (the last one controlling Transylvania was Austrian-Hungarian empire), local Germans and Hungarians found themselves encircled in the middle of Romania, where many of them still live.Read more