The story
History
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire conquered Dacia in AD 101 and 106, during the rule of Trajan, and the Roman settlement Napoca, established about 106, is first recorded on a milestone discovered in 1758 in the vicinity of the city. Trajan's successor Hadrian granted Napoca the status of municipium as municipium Aelium Hadrianum Napocenses. Later, in the second century AD, the city gained the status of a colonia as Colonia Aurelia Napoca. Napoca became a provincial capital of Dacia Porolissensis and thus the seat of a procurator. The colonia was evacuated in 274 by the Romans. There are no references to urban settlement on the site for the better part of a millennium thereafter.
Middle Ages
At the beginning of the Middle Ages, two groups of buildings existed on the current site of the city: the wooden fortress at Cluj-Mănăștur (Kolozsmonostor) and the civilian settlement developed around the current Piața Muzeului (Museum Place) in the city centre. Although the precise date of the conquest of Transylvania by the Hungarians is not known, the earliest Hungarian artifacts found in the region are dated to the first half of the tenth century. In any case, after that time, the city became part of the Kingdom of Hungary. King Stephen I made the city the seat of the castle county of Kolozs, and King Saint Ladislaus I of Hungary founded the abbey of Cluj-Mănăștur (Kolozsmonostor), destroyed during the Tatar invasions in 1241 and 1285. As for the civilian colony, a castle and a village were built to the northwest of the ancient Napoca no later than the late 12th century. This new village was settled by large groups of Transylvanian Saxons, encouraged during the reign of Crown Prince Stephen, Duke of Transylvania. The first reliable mention of the settlement dates from 1275, in a document of King Ladislaus IV of Hungary, when the village (Villa Kulusvar) was granted to the Bishop of Transylvania. On 19 August 1316, during the rule of the new king, Charles I of Hungary, Cluj was granted the status of a city (Latin: civitas), as a reward for the Saxons' contribution to the defeat of the rebellious Transylvanian voivode, Ladislaus Kán.
The couple buried together and known as the Lovers of Cluj-Napoca are believed to have lived between 1450 and 1550.
Many craft guilds were established in the second half of the 13th century, and a patrician stratum based in commerce and craft production displaced the older landed elite in the town's leadership. Through the privilege granted by Sigismund of Luxembourg in 1405, the city opted out from the jurisdiction of voivodes, vice-voivodes and royal judges, and obtained the right to elect a twelve-member jury every year. In 1488, King Matthias Corvinus (born in Kolozsvár in 1443) ordered that the centumvirate—the city council, consisting of one hundred men—be half composed from the homines bone conditiones (the wealthy people), with craftsmen supplying the other half; together they would elect the chief judge and the jury. Meanwhile, an agreement was reached providing that half of the representatives on this city council were to be drawn from the Hungarian, half from the Saxon population, and that judicial offices were to be held on a rotating basis. In 1541, Kolozsvár became part of the Eastern Hungarian Kingdom (that transformed to Principality of Transylvania in 1570) after the Ottoman Turks occupied the central part of the Kingdom of Hungary; a period of economic and cultural prosperity followed. Although Alba Iulia (Gyulafehérvár) served as a political capital for the princes of Transylvania, Cluj (Kolozsvár) enjoyed the support of the princes to a greater extent, thus establishing connections with the most important centres of Eastern Europe at that time, along with Košice (Kassa), Kraków, Prague and Vienna.
16th–18th centuries
In terms of religion, Protestant ideas first appeared in the middle of the 16th century. During Gáspár Heltai's service as preacher, Lutheranism grew in importance, as did the Swiss doctrine of Calvinism. By 1571, the Turda (Torda) Diet had adopted a more radical religion, Ferenc Dávid's Unitarianism, characterised by the free interpretation of the Bible and denial of the dogma of the Trinity. Stephen Báthory founded a Catholic Jesuit academy in the city in order to promote an anti-Reform movement; however, it did not have much success. For a year, in 1600–1601, Cluj became part of the personal union of Michael the Brave. Under the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699, it became part of the Habsburg monarchy.
In the 17th century, Cluj suffered from great calamities, suffering from epidemics of the plague and devastating fires. By the end of the century, Turkish rule ended, but the city had lost much of its wealth, freedom, importance, and population. It gradually regained its important position within Transylvania as the headquarters of the Gubernium and the Diets between 1719 and 1732, and again from 1790 until the revolution of 1848, when the Gubernium moved to Nagyszeben (Hermannstadt), present-day Sibiu). In 1791, a group of Romanian intellectuals drew up a petition, known as the Supplex Libellus Valachorum, which was sent to the emperor in Vienna. The petition demanded equality for the Romanian nation in Transylvania with the other nations (Saxon, Szekler, and Hungarian) governed by the Unio Trium Nationum, but it was rejected by the Diet of Cluj.
19th century
Beginning in 1830, the city became the centre of the Hungarian national movement within the principality. This erupted with the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. The Austrian commander Karl von Urban took control of the city on 18 November 1848, following a battle. Subsequently, the Hungarian army, led by the Polish general Józef Bem, launched an offensive into Transylvania and recaptured the city by Christmas 1848.
After the 1848 revolution, an absolutist regime was established, followed by a liberal government that came to power in 1860. During this latter period, equal rights were granted to ethnic Romanians, but only briefly. In 1865, the Diet in Cluj abolished the laws voted in Sibiu (Nagyszeben/Hermannstadt), and proclaimed the 1848 Law concerning the Union of Transylvania with Hungary. A modern university was founded in 1872, with the intention of promoting the integration of Transylvania into Hungary. Before 1918, the city's only Romanian-language schools were two church-run elementary schools, and the first printed Romanian periodical did not appear until 1903.
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After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, the city and all of Transylvania were once again incorporated into the Kingdom of Hungary. During this time, Kolozsvár/Cluj was among the largest and most important cities of the kingdom and was the seat of Kolozs County. Ethnic Romanians in Transylvania suffered oppression and persecution. Their grievances found expression in the Transylvanian Memorandum, a petition sent in 1892 by the political leaders of Transylvania's Romanians to the Austro-Hungarian Emperor-King Franz Joseph. It asked for equal rights with the Hungarians and demanded an end to persecutions and attempts at Magyarisation. The Emperor forwarded the memorandum to Budapest—the Hungarian capital. The authors, among them Ioan Rațiu and Iuliu Coroianu, were arrested, tried and sentenced to prison for "high treason" in Kolozsvár/Cluj in May 1894. During the trial, approximately 20,000 people who had come to Cluj demonstrated on the streets of the city in support of the defendants. A year later, the King gave them pardon upon the advice of his Hungarian prime minister, Dezső Bánffy. In 1897, the Hungarian government decided that only Hungarian place names should be used and prohibited the use of the German or Romanian versions of the city's name on official government documents.
20th century
In the autumn of 1918, as World War I neared its end, Cluj became a centre of revolutionary activity, headed by Amos Frâncu. On 28 October 1918, Frâncu called for the organisation of the "union of all Romanians". Thirty-nine delegates were elected from Cluj to attend the proclamation of the union of Transylvania with the Kingdom of Romania in the Great National Assembly of Alba Iulia on 1 December 1918; the transfer of sovereignty was formalised by the Treaty of Trianon in June 1920. The interwar years saw the new authorities embark on a "Romanianisation" campaign: a Capitoline Wolf statue donated by Rome was set up in 1921; in 1932 a plaque written by historian Nicolae Iorga was placed on Matthias Corvinus's statue, emphasising his Romanian paternal ancestry; and construction of an imposing Orthodox cathedral began, in a city where only about a tenth of the inhabitants belonged to the Orthodox state church. This endeavour had only mixed results: by 1939, Hungarians still dominated local economic and (to a certain extent) cultural life: for instance, Cluj had five Hungarian daily newspapers and just one in Romanian.
In 1940, Cluj, along with the rest of Northern Transylvania, became part of Miklós Horthy's Hungary through the Second Vienna Award arbitrated by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, as Romania drew closer to the Axis powers. After the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944 and installed a puppet government under Döme Sztójay, they forced large-scale antisemitic measures in the city. The headquarters of the local Gestapo were located in the New York Hotel. That May, the authorities began the relocation of the Jews to the Iris ghetto. Liquidation of the 16,148 captured Jews occurred through six deportations to Auschwitz in May–June 1944. Despite facing severe sanctions from the Hungarian administration, some Jews escaped across the border to Romania, with the assistance of intellectuals such as Emil Hațieganu, Raoul Șorban, Aurel Socol and Dezső Miskolczy, as well as various peasants from Mănăștur.
On 11 October 1944 the city was captured by Romanian and Soviet troops. It was formally restored to the Kingdom of Romania by the Treaty of Paris in 1947. On 24 January, 6 March and 10 May 1946, the Romanian students, who had come back to Cluj after the restoration of northern Transylvania, rose against the claims of autonomy made by nostalgic Hungarians and the new way of life imposed by the Soviets, resulting in clashes and street fights.
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 produced a powerful echo within the city; there was a real possibility that demonstrations by students sympathising with their peers across the border could escalate into an uprising. The protests provided the Romanian authorities with a pretext to speed up the process of "unification" of the local Babeș (Romanian) and Bolyai (Hungarian) universities, allegedly contemplated before the 1956 events. Hungarians remained the majority of the city's population until the 1960s. Then Romanians began to outnumber Hungarians, due to the population increase as a result of the government's forced industrialisation of the city and new jobs. During the Communist period, the city recorded a high industrial development, as well as enforced construction expansion. On 16 October 1974, when the city celebrated 1850 years since its first mention as Napoca, the Communist government changed the name of the city by adding "Napoca" to it.
1989 revolution and after
During the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Cluj-Napoca was one of the scenes of the rebellion: 26 were killed and approximately 170 injured. After the end of totalitarian rule, the nationalist politician Gheorghe Funar became mayor and governed for the next 12 years. His tenure was marked by strong Romanian nationalism and acts of ethnic provocation against the Hungarian-speaking minority. This deterred foreign investment; however, in June 2004, Gheorghe Funar was voted out of office, and the city entered a period of rapid economic growth. From 2004 to 2009, the mayor was Emil Boc, concurrently president of the Democratic Liberal Party. He went on to be elected as prime minister, returning as mayor in 2012.
Historical architecture
The nucleus of the old city, an important cultural and commercial centre, used to be a military camp, attested in documents with the name "castrum Clus".
The oldest residence in Cluj-Napoca is the Matthias Corvinus House, originally a Gothic structure that bears Transylvanian Renaissance characteristics due to a later renovation. Such changes feature on other Hungarian townspeople's residences, built from the mid-15th century mostly of stone and wood with a cellar, ground floor and upper storey, in the Late Gothic and Renaissance styles; although the late medieval houses have often been considerably altered, the street façades of the old town are mostly preserved. St. Michael's Church, the oldest and most representative Gothic-style building in the country, dates back to the 14th century. The oldest of its sections is the altar, dedicated in 1390, while the newest part is the clock tower, which was built in Gothic Revival style (1860).
As Renaissance styles survived late in the city, the appearance of Baroque art was also delayed, but from the mid-18th century Klausenburg was once again at the centre of the development and spread of art in Transylvania, as it had been two centuries earlier. The first enthusiasts for Baroque were the Catholic Church and the landed aristocracy. Artists came initially from south Germany and Austria, but by the end of the century most of the work was by local craftsmen. The earliest signs of the new style appear in the furnishings of St. Michael's church: the altarpieces and pulpit, which date to the 1740s, are carved, painted and richly decorated with figures. An altarpiece depicting the Adoration of the Magi (1748–50) is the work of Franz Anton Maulbertsch. The earliest two-towered Baroque church was built by the Jesuits from 1718 to 1724 on the pattern of Košice and was later handed over to the Piarists. During the century more simply designed Baroque churches were built for the mendicant orders, Lutherans, Unitarians and the Orthodox Church. The noble families built houses and even palaces in the old town. The Baroque Bánffy Palace (1774–1785), constructed around a rectangular yard, is the masterpiece of Eberhardt Blaumann. Its peculiarity lies in the appearance of the principal façade.
Both Avram Iancu and Unrii Squares feature ensembles of eclectic and baroque–rococo architecture, including the Palace of Justice, the Theatre, the Iuliu Maniu symmetrical street, and the New York Palace, among others. In the 19th century many houses were built in the Neo-classical, Romantic and Eclectic styles. Also dating to that period are the two-towered Neo-classical Calvinist church (1829–50), its new college building of 1801, and the City Hall (1843–46) in the marketplace, by Antal Kagerbauer.
The banks of the Someșul Mic also feature a wide variety of such old buildings. The end of the 19th century brought a building ensemble that fastens the corners of the oldest bridge over the river, at the north end of the Regele Ferdinand Avenue. The Berde, Babos, Elian, Urania, and Széki palaces consist of a mixture of Baroque, Renaissance and Gothic styles, following the Art Nouveau/Secession and Revival specifics.
In the 2000s, the old city centre underwent extensive restoration works, meant to convert much of it into a pedestrian area, including Bulevardul Eroilor, Unirii Square and other smaller streets. In some residential areas of the city, particularly the high-income southern areas, like Andrei Mureșanu or Strada Republicii, there are many turn-of-the-century villas.
From Wikipedia’s article on Cluj-Napoca companies, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3