Prejmer fortified church

Prejmer, a village on the plain northeast of Brașov, is home to one of the best preserved of the fortified churches that the Transylvanian Saxons built to survive five centuries of raids. Its story begins with the Teutonic Knights, whom King Andrew II of Hungary allowed to settle in the Burzenland around 1211. They began the church in 1218 on a Greek-cross plan, with four equal arms, a layout unique in Transylvania and found only in a handful of churches in northeastern Germany. After the knights were expelled in 1225, Cistercian monks completed the building around 1240; the parish later became Lutheran with the Reformation, as it remains today.

What makes Prejmer extraordinary is the ring that grew around the church. The village sat at the mouth of the Buzău Pass, the first place invading Ottoman and Tatar armies reached as they came over the Carpathians, and it was destroyed many times over. In the 15th and 16th centuries the villagers answered with a circular wall up to 12 metres high and as much as 5 metres thick, once surrounded by a moat. Built into its inner face, on four levels, are more than 270 small rooms that served as refuges and storerooms, and some 1,600 people could shelter inside during a siege. Records show the fortress fell only once, to Gabriel Báthory in 1611.

Visitors enter the way attackers would have had to: through a vaulted passage around 30 metres long, guarded by a barbican and a portcullis. Inside, the effect is of a small walled town, with the church in a courtyard ringed by tiers of stairways and galleries. Visitors can walk into some of the rooms, and the stairs lead up to the covered wall walk with its firing openings. Inside the church, the interior is spare, but it holds the oldest winged altarpiece in Transylvania, painted around 1450, a triptych of the Passion with a large gilded Crucifixion at its centre. The bell tower over the crossing was added in 1461, and side aisles were added in the early 16th century.

A restoration in the 1960s returned the complex to its historic form, and since 1999 Prejmer has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage site Villages with Fortified Churches in Transylvania. Seen from the lanes of the village, with the curved wall rising above the houses, it still reads as a fortress first and a church second.

Getting there

Prejmer is about 18 km northeast of Brașov; the nearest town of any size is Săcele, about 13 km away. Brașov-Ghimbav International Airport (GHV) is about 20 km in a straight line. The church stands in the centre of the village and is open as a museum.