2018_Arheologia Bisericilor urbane din sudul Transilvaniei.pdf/The Archaeology of Urban Churches in Southern Transylvania – a Preliminary Approach (original) (raw)

2018, Cluj-Kolozsvár-Klausenburg 700. Várostörténeti tanulmányok. Studii de istorie urbană. Főszerk. Lupescu Makó Mária. Szerk. Ionuț Costea, Ovidiu Ghitta, Sipos Gábor, Rüsz-Fogarasi Enikő. Erdélyi Múzeum-Egyesület, Kolozsvár,

The Archaeology of Urban Churches in Southern Transylvania – a Preliminary Approach The paper is an introduction in the archaeology of the foremost medieval parish churches of Southern Transylvania, namely those in Sibiu, Brașov, Sighișoara and Sebeș. In a side by side approach, the paper briefly illustrates the state of the archaeological research and the contribution brought by archaeology to the understanding of these buildings and to the restitution of the development of the local ecclesiastical architecture. The author aims to draw attention to three aspects: the benefits brought by archaeology in reconstructing the early stages of the religious architecture, the low level of involvement of the archaeologist in urban excavations and the low percent of processed and published investigations. The analyzed settlements belong to the South-Transylvanian German colonization area and were established in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries. They must have had a parish church ever since the very first few decades of their existence, but, in all cases, we have no accurate knowledge of it. What reached us are the Late Gothic churches, built in the late fourteenth century and in the fifteenth century and finished by the early sixteenth century. Seen in the context of their emergence, these churches are situated at the end of a local architectural development and their sites conceal the beginnings of the religious architecture of Transylvania. However, these early stages cannot be identified without archaeological investigation and our current state of research is needy. The investigation of the urban churches has been carried out to greatly different extents, during restoration and/or systematization works of the surrounding area (civil works, landscaping projects, etc.). Except for the site in Sibiu, in all the other cases the archaeological excavation consisted solely of trenches, which resulted in fragmented data, difficult or impossible to correlate. Both the indoor and the outdoor areas of the churches in Sebeș and Sighișoara have been investigated, but man has knowledge only of the most general results. The church in Sibiu has the best archaeological knowledge, since the investigation has been carefully documented and almost exhaustively published. The Black Church in Brașov, the least researched of all, ends the list. Here, the first actual archaeological data have been obtained in 2012, during some rather restricted outdoor investigations. As regards our state of knowledge, this more than lacking level of archaeological data is reflected, first of all, in the fact that we have no concrete data about the antecedents of three of these churches. The parish churches erected during the colonization period in Sibiu and Sebeș have most certainly been important benchmarks in the religious architectural development of Transylvania, as must have been the churches in Sighișoara (part of a noble residence) and Brașov (monastery) too. Secondly, the shaky chronological timetable currently at our disposal is a result of disregarding the undertaking of systematic archaeological studies in urban religious sites. This state of affairs should be an alarm signal for anybody involved in urban management, but, just maybe, primary for archaeologists.