Cluj-Napoca is the young engine of Transylvania. The region's historical and cultural capital is a university city through and through: more than a hundred thousand students give it a contagious energy, with packed cafés, terraces, galleries, a booming tech scene (it's been called Romania's 'Silicon Valley') and some of the biggest music festivals in Eastern Europe. It's modern, cultured and surprisingly cosmopolitan, a far cry from the medieval Transylvania cliché.
But Cluj also has centuries of history behind it. Founded on the ancient Roman city of Napoca, in the Middle Ages it was a prosperous Saxon town and, above all, the great Hungarian capital of Transylvania (Kolozsvár), birthplace of King Matthias Corvinus, one of the greatest monarchs of the Renaissance. That past left a grand square dominated by the imposing Gothic St Michael's Church, Baroque palaces, churches, a historic university and a multicultural identity (Romanian, Hungarian, German, Jewish) that you can still feel in its streets.
This guide covers the essentials of Cluj-Napoca with a practical, friendly eye: what to see in the historic centre, where to feel the pulse of its student life and nightlife, how to get around, and how to take the unmissable day trip to the incredible Turda salt mine. Cluj is the gateway to north-western Romania and the best proof that Transylvania is as young and vibrant as it is historic.
Cluj-Napoca has ancient roots: on a Dacian settlement, the Romans founded the city of Napoca in the 2nd century, and it went on to gain the rank of municipium and colonia. After the Roman withdrawal and centuries of obscurity, the town of Cluj (Kolozsvár in Hungarian, Klausenburg in German) grew up in the Middle Ages, settled by German Saxons and Hungarians, and prospered as a walled centre of trade and crafts. Matthias Corvinus was born here in 1443; he would become one of Hungary's greatest kings and a patron of the Renaissance. Cluj was an important cultural and religious centre; in the 16th century, during the Reformation, it was a hub of Protestantism and Unitarianism. For centuries it was the main city and often the capital of Transylvania, first under the autonomous Principality, a vassal of the Ottomans, and later under the Habsburgs. In the 19th century it flourished as the region's Hungarian cultural capital, with its university. In 1918, along with the rest of Transylvania, it joined Romania, although it kept a large Hungarian population. In the 20th century it was a flashpoint between Romanian and Hungarian identities. In 1974 the communist regime officially added 'Napoca' to the name, highlighting its Roman origins. Today it is Romania's great university and tech city: prosperous, young and multicultural. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The mountainous heart of Romania, a land of Saxon citadels, castles and minorities: a thousand years inside Hungary and the Habsburg empire before joining Romania in 1918, and the homeland of the Dracula myth.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The history of Cluj-Napoca begins in antiquity. Before the Romans, the area was inhabited by the Dacians, the people who dominated these lands. After the Roman conquest of Dacia by the emperor Trajan at the start of the second century, the city of Napoca was founded here, which prospered as an urban centre and reached the rank of municipium and then of colonia, with a forum, baths and streets laid out in the Roman manner. That Latin origin is what the second part of the city's present name claims.
After the Roman withdrawal from Dacia in the third century and the upheavals of the great migrations, Napoca emptied out and its trace was lost through dark centuries. The medieval city that would be reborn on the site had a different origin.
In the Middle Ages, with Transylvania already part of the kingdom of Hungary, the town of Cluj (Kolozsvár in Hungarian, Klausenburg in German) developed on the same site. As in other Transylvanian towns, the Hungarian kings encouraged the settlement of German Saxon colonists, who along with the Hungarian population drove its growth as a commercial and craft centre. By the thirteenth century, Cluj was starting to stand out as one of the important places in the region, a rise that would speed up in the following centuries until it became one of the great cities of Transylvania.
Through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Cluj established itself as a prosperous walled town, with its craft guilds, its churches and its trade. The monument that best symbolises that period is the Gothic church of St Michael, raised between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, one of the largest in Transylvania and still today the heart of the city.
The great son of Cluj was born here in 1443: Matthias Corvinus (Matei Corvin in Romanian), who would become king of Hungary and one of the most brilliant monarchs of the European Renaissance. Under his reign (1458-1490), Hungary reached its political and cultural peak; Matthias was a great patron of the arts and letters, put together one of the most famous libraries of the age (the Bibliotheca Corviniana) and held back the Ottoman advance. The house where he is believed to have been born still stands in the centre of Cluj, and his monumental equestrian statue presides over Union Square, in front of St Michael's church.
The sixteenth century brought great changes. After Hungary's defeat by the Ottomans at Mohács (1526), Transylvania became an autonomous principality, a vassal of the sultan, and Cluj was one of its main towns. It was also a religious hotbed: the Protestant Reformation caught fire here, and Cluj became a centre of Lutheranism, Calvinism and, very particularly, Unitarianism, a current that found refuge here under the religious tolerance of the Edict of Turda (1568), a pioneer in Europe. The town was a notable cultural centre, with printing presses and colleges.
At the start of the eighteenth century, after the Ottoman withdrawal, Transylvania — and Cluj with it — passed to the Habsburg monarchy, the Austrian Empire. For much of this period, Cluj (Kolozsvár) was the administrative and cultural capital of the Grand Principality of Transylvania, seat of the diet (the assembly) and centre of the political and social life of the region's Hungarian aristocracy.
The city was embellished with baroque palaces, such as the sumptuous Bánffy Palace (1774-1785), residence of one of the great noble families and today home to the Art Museum. Cluj established itself as the main focus of Hungarian culture in Transylvania: its theatrical, publishing and educational life developed, and in the nineteenth century a university took hold that made it a great centre of learning.
The nineteenth century was also that of the awakening of nationalisms. The large Romanian population of Transylvania, a majority across the region as a whole but for centuries without full rights, was gaining a national consciousness, while the Hungarian elite defended its dominance. The 1848 revolution, which in Transylvania set Hungarians and Romanians violently against each other (the Romanian hero Avram Iancu led his own people), and then the compromise that created Austria-Hungary in 1867, marked an era of national tensions that would explode in the following century. Cluj lived as a town with a Hungarian majority in a region with a Romanian majority.
The end of the First World War changed the fate of Cluj. With the defeat of Austria-Hungary, the Great Assembly of Alba Iulia proclaimed on 1 December 1918 the union of Transylvania with the Kingdom of Romania, and Cluj became part of the Romanian state, although it still had a Hungarian majority population. The city became a symbol of the new Romanian Transylvania: the great Orthodox Cathedral was built in the square now called Avram Iancu, and the university passed into Romanian hands, in a process not free of tension with the Hungarian community.
The twentieth century was turbulent. Between 1940 and 1944, under the Second Vienna Award imposed by Nazi Germany, northern Transylvania, Cluj included, went back temporarily to Hungary, an Axis ally; in that period, the city's Jewish community, large and flourishing, was deported in 1944 to Auschwitz, where most were murdered, a tragedy the city remembers soberly. After the war, Cluj returned to Romania.
Under the communist regime, the city industrialised and grew, and its make-up gradually evened out with the arrival of Romanian population. In 1974, the Ceaușescu regime officially added 'Napoca' to the name — Cluj-Napoca — underlining the Roman origin of the city in a nationalist key. In the 1990s, after the fall of communism, Cluj went through a period of strong inter-ethnic tension under a Romanian nationalist mayor, which was eventually overcome.
Today Cluj-Napoca is one of the most prosperous, young and dynamic cities in Romania: the country's great university capital, with more than a hundred thousand students, a powerful technology hub, an intense cultural life and some of the largest music festivals in Eastern Europe. Romanian and Hungarian, historic and modern, it is the best example of the young, European face of Transylvania today.
