The sacristy door
One lock throwing nineteen bolts, from 1515.
Fridolin68 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Florio1974 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Андрей Романенко — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Radueduard — CC BY-SA 4.0
Three are worth it, and two of them fit in a day. **Biertan** is the most complete, best known and easiest to reach. **Viscri** is the most beautiful as a village — painted houses on a dirt street, a white fortified church, and people still living as they did; it became known because King Charles III bought a house there. **Prejmer** near Brașov is architecturally the strongest: two hundred and seventy-five storerooms built into a circular wall, one for every family in the village. The roads are narrow and winding — allow more time than the map suggests.
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The fortified church of Biertan stands on a hill in the middle of a small Saxon village, and is the best known and most complete of the seven fortified churches on the World Heritage list: **three rings of walls** and towers rising around a late Gothic church of the early sixteenth century. It was the seat of the Lutheran bishop of Transylvania for nearly three centuries, from 1572 to 1867, which is what made it the richest in the region. The altar is a polyptych of twenty-eight panels, and in the sacristy is a **door whose lock throws nineteen bolts with one turn of the key** — a piece of engineering from 1515 that was shown at the Paris World Exposition. And in the courtyard is the room everyone knows: the **marriage prison**. The bishop shut any couple seeking a divorce in it for two weeks, with one bed, one plate and one spoon. Tradition holds that only one divorce was recorded in three centuries — a story told cheerfully, though compelling people to stay together is not quite what we would call a solution today.
One lock throwing nineteen bolts, from 1515.
A room where those seeking divorce were shut for two weeks.
Biertan, Sibiu county