Cluj Museums Tour

With its cupolas, Baroque and Secession outcroppings and weathered fin-de-siecle backstreets, the center of Cluj looks every inch the Hungarian provincial capital it was once.

Our tour begins with the Piata Unirii. Surrounded by shops and restaurants, Piata Unirii is the centre of the city, being dominated by St Michael´s Cathedral, built between 1349 and 1487, in the German Gothic style of the Saxons who then ruled unchallenged over the city. The imposing equestrian statue of Matyas Corvinus, found south of the cathedral, tramples the crescent banner of the Turks underfoot.

Close to Piata Unirii, we will admire the imposing, beautiful buildings of Continental Hotel, built in an eclectic syle combining Renaissance, Classical and Baroque elements, the Hintz House, which served as Cluj´s first apothecary and which now houses the Pharmacy Museum and the small fifteenth-century mansion where Hungary´s greatest king was born.

The Art Museum offers the best survey of Romanian art in the country. It is housed in the Baroque Banffy Palace, built in 1774 – 91 to the design of Johann Eberhardt Blaumann for the Banffy family. The collection is dominated by works of the largely French-influenced artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with pieces by Theodor Aman and Romania´s best-known painter, Nicolae Grigorescu.

Continuing our tour to Piata Muzeului, we will admire the Roman ruins found just close to the History Museum of Transylvania. Inside, the museum displays on the first floor strange skulls and mammoth tusks, succeded by arrow and spearheads, charting progress from the Neolithic and Bronze Ages to the rise of the Dacian civilization. On the floor above, the story continues up to World War I.

Up on the hills that surround all the city of Cluj, in the central part of the city, there are the Botanical Gardens, the largest in southeastern Europe, with more than 10.000 species. They contain a museum and herbarium, greenhouses with desert and tropical plants, including Amazon waterlilies and a small Japanese garden.

The tour ends up with the most representative museum in Cluj, the Ethnographic Museum, famous for its displays of Romania´s finest collection of traditional carpets and folk costumes. The museum has an extent represented by an open-air section in the Hoia hill, with peasant houses and three wooden churches from the surrounding areas of Cluj.