The "Emil Sigerus" Museum of Saxon Ethnography was established on the 1st of July 1997. Its heritage includes over 7,000 items from Transylvania from the 14th - 20th centuries. The most relevant belonged to renowned collectors such as Emil Sigerus, Julius Bielz, Wilhelm and Gisela Richter, Carl Engber and Erwin Ulbrich, completed by the acquisitions made by the museum specialists. Most pieces had belonged to the first Saxon museum, "Karpatenmuseum" (the Carpathian Museum), established in Sibiu. The museum heritage comprises three collections, costumes-textiles, pottery, wood-bone-iron, each of them including extremely valuable pieces, representative for the culture and ...civilization of the Transylvanian Saxons and especially for their contribution to the growth and enrichment of Romanian and world culture. The permanent exhibition "Transylvanian Store Tiles (15th - 19th centuries), located in the pavement of the building in 12 Piaţa Huet, is a unique original attempt of presenting one of the representative crafts of the Saxon community - the manufacturing of store tiles (the store tiles collection is considered to be the most complex valuable collection of this kind in the country and one of the richest in Europe; it was first presented within the permanent exhibition opened in 1998). The archaeological excavations conducted in 1996 revealed that in the place of the current building there was a wooden house, dated on the basis of a coin from the reign of King Bela IV (1235-1270). The building was raised on a trapezoidal surface, with a pavement, two storeys and an attic. Both fronts, the one facing Piaţa Mică and the other one towards Piaţa Huet, with identical decoration, were restored by the end of 1997. The vaulted cellar, 3-3.5 m high, was inaugurated as exhibition hall in 1997, and since the autumn of 1998 it has housed the permanent exhibition of the "Emil Sigerus" Museum of Saxon Ethnography.
Location