The Gateway to Covasna County

The southern gateway to Szeklerland, the northern border of Saxon Land in the Burzenland, Chichiș has always been a kind of border settlement. Sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally. Situated roughly halfway between Sfântu Gheorghe and Brasov, between 1940 and 1944, it was also a railway border station and an important railway crossing point.

Its most important "feature," however, is the Battle of Chichiș in 1849, the memory of the Revolution in Covasna County, and the legend that the cannon-caster major Áron Gábor was mortally wounded near the bridge of the Negru River. Although military historians link the fatal event to another place near the road to Ozun, nothing can erase the significance of the bridge, which has been sung about and immortalised by many.

But Chichiș, whose surroundings have been inhabited since prehistoric times and the migration period, is also worthy of attention for its recently restored medieval Unitarian church. On the site of the current building, a smaller church with an extended semicircular sanctuary stood as early as the 14th century and was rebuilt several times in the late Middle Ages and after the Reformation. A fresco, categorised as an art historical curiosity, has been preserved on the western wall of the church, one of the depictions of the famous legend of St. Lazarus in Szeklerland.

Samu Csinta