„Biserica mică” a cetăţii Aiudului în surse din secolul al XIX-lea
The Aiud Fortress’ “Little Church” in the Sources of the Nineteenth Century

Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with one of the medieval churches from Aiud (Nagyenyed, Enyed, Strasßburg/Mieresch), namely with the „little church”, which was demolished by the Lutheran community in 1865-66. This church was located to the north of the „great church” (now belonging to the Reformed cult), which was the parochial church in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries. The secondary literature of the demolished church contains little and erroneous information. Although field investigations were made in the nineteenth century, their published results have largely been ignored. These texts were published before and after the demolition, in 1858, 1866-1868, and 1874 by Károly Szathmáry, Friedrich Müller, Gustav Seivert, and Rómer Flóris, as well as a drawing by Ödön Nemes. Our aim is to use these texts as sources for offering a better-defined image about the location, architecture, painting, age and the role of the monument. The pieces of information given by these authors suggest that the church was built in the fourteenth century. The building was modest, having a length of 15-18 meters in the area of the existing Lutheran church. It consisted of a rectangular nave, with a three-sided altar, and with buttresses on the corners. In the basement was a crypt filled with bones. The ground floor was a space for cult. Both rooms were vaulted. Later, probably in the fifteenth century, during the construction of the „great church”, the „little” one received a nave on the north side, another room as a sacristy and a tower above the altar. Its architecture consists of Romanesque shapes (at the windows), but also Gothic, most probably in two phases: one identified as early Gothic and the other as late Gothic. The altar, at least, was covered with frescoes, and the Apostles Thomas and Andreas were identified in the drawings made before the demolition. Given its location in the neighborhood of the parochial church, the ossuary-vault in its basement, and the analogies we can affirm that the “little church” (probably dedicated to St. Spiritus) from the fortress of Aiud was for a while a funerary chapel, which received a defense function with the construction of the tower on the altar.

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