The building of the former Dominican monastery in Cluj is one of the best preserved medieval monasteries in Transylvania. The first documentary mention of the monastery dates back to 1397, but some architectural details preserved to this day suggest that it was built earlier, during the 14th century, and then transformed in the second half of the 15th century. The 15th century construction was supported through a donation of salt by the Hungarian supreme captain John Hunyadi in 1455, which was later renewed by King Matthias (1458-1490), Vladislaus II (1490-1516) and Louis II (1516-1526). During John Hunyadi’s time, the most significant spaces of the ensemble were built: the ambulatory, the refectory, the kitchen and the chapter house.
The architectural details of the building, such as the central supporting pillar of the refectory, the windows of the external façades and the ribbing type of the vaults are characteristic of Late Gothic architecture in Transylvania, their details being closely related to the stylistic characteristics of the workshop that worked on the construction of the royal palace in Buda.
During the Reformation, the Dominican monks were forced to leave Cluj, and the monastery thus became the location of the Calvinist and Unitarian school in Cluj. In 1556, Isabella Jagiellon (1519-1559), wife of King John I Zápolya, was temporarily lodged in the building of the former monastery.
At the end of the 17th century, the building was taken back by the Roman Catholic Church. At first, the monastery was owned by the Jesuit order, and then, from 1725, by the Franciscan order which rebuilt the church and monastery in the Baroque style in the following decades.
The last major interventions of the Franciscan order took place between 1902-1908, when the monastery building was restored by architects István Möller and Kálmán Lux. They aimed to reinforce the structure of the building and to remove all Baroque elements in order to restore the unified appearance of the initial Gothic building. On the occasion of the restoration, a number of the original frames were replaced with exact copies, and the original ones were donated to the Numismatic and Antiquities Collection of the Transylvanian Museum Association.
(Illustration) The main façade of the monastery in the 1970s, photographer Dénes Szabó (Országos Széchényi Könyvtár, Budapest)