The Brukenthal National Museum within SCAF - the International Festival of Contemporary Art from Sibiu invites you to see the only known catacombs of the city. Built in the basement of the Ursuline Church and Monastery, the catacombs are real crypts that house the tombs of the nuns and servants of the former monastery.
The project to teach about the history of the city is carried out by the Brukenthal National Museum in collaboration with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Alba Iulia and the Greek Catholic Parish of Sibiu.
The visits will take place daily, starting on Saturday, September 7, 2024, at 12, 3 and 5 p.m. They will be visited in groups of a maximum of 10 people, the cost of a ticket being 25 lei.
Initially, the Ursuline church and monastery, located in Sibiu, on Sării Street (currently Gheorghe Magheru Street), was the place of worship of a monastery of Dominican monks, who in 1474, when they moved inside the defensive wall, had built the church and the monastery.
Originally belonging to the Gothic style, the elements preserved today are the broken arch access portal, made of stone, the area of ​​the chapel on the northern wall at the level of the vaults and frames, but also the presence of buttresses on the outside.
During the communist period, the Pedagogical High School functioned here, and after 1990 will change its name to “Andrei Șaguna” Pedagogical College. In 2010, the college will move to Turnu Roșu alley.
The basement of the Ursuline Church and Convent was used during the war as an air raid shelter and war hospital. In the basement of the church there are dozens of graves on which time has left its mark but also man, through destruction. The crypts house the remains of nuns and monks who served in Sibiu or who died here.
Their names are difficult to identify, in most cases very few graves retain the initial markers. What catches your attention from the first moments when you enter the catacombs is that some funerary monuments are open. The destroyed coffins and the bones removed from the sarcophagus are traces left over time by the generations who, out of curiosity or showmanship, destroyed a part of the unknown history of Sibiu.