Balck & White Medieval Times

The past few days I've been participating in the city days, which had multiple locations, one of which was the medieval fortress of Târgu Mureș, Marosvásárhely. It's a lovely place for every event, let alone an event that celebrates the city that had been defended by this fortress for so many years.

For me every fortress is a beauty and a treasure and as I have an obsession with bricks and stones, photographing the walls, stairs and bastions is a true pleasure. Sometimes I'm capable of taking tens of shots of the same place from different angles and that's what happened this weekend.

The fortress has been renovated recently, so all the stairs, corridors and everything else look newish and are perfectly safe.

I took a lot of photos this weekend and I thought I'd do a black and white series in this post as it matches the medieval era perfectly and sometimes taking out colors gives you the possibility to highlight the details, which is my intention with this post. These stairs take you to an open corridor of the wall, that served for the army to take position in front of the gaps through which the guns and cannons were shooting the enemy.

To preserve the medieval look and feeling, all the lights inside the fortress and around it are of this style.

This is the wedding hall, or the city hall for weddings, I'm not sure which one is the right expression for that. In Romania you can have two weddings (I don't mean the party, but the vow), but only the one officiated by the city official is official. The religious one is in front of God, but it can't be considered official. This building can't get a better place to be honest as all the couples are taking photographs in the park inside the fortress. In the background you can see the tower of the fortress church.

This is the other side of the wedding hall.

This is the back side of the church. As you can see, there are two parts. The brick part is the old part, the rest must have been added later.

The Fortress Church or the Big Church (in Hungarian Vártemplom) is the oldest surviving church in Târgu Mureș.
After less than a century from the first historical proof of the existence of the Franciscan order in Transylvania, Hungarian Kingdom Franciscan friars arrived in the town. The monastery is first mentioned in 1332. Its building took an entire century, from the middle of the 14th century until the middle of the 15th and includes the monastery building, an older chapel, the church and the steeple. As far as the architectural style is concerned, these buildings belong to the late Gothic, both structurally and aesthetically. There were three building periods: 1350–1370 – when the chapel and monastery were built, 1370–1400 – the erection of the church choir and 1400–1450 – the last period during which the church and steeple were finalized. source

I truly appreciate, that the bricks were not covered with a coat during renovation woks. This is how it should look as most likely this is how it looked originally. The windows were not colored, so you haven't lost anything while I applied the black and white filter.

I love it, love it, love it! I must have been an architect, possibly in medieval times in one of my previous lives :))

This strange structure is where the craftsman's studio was once, according to the officials it was in 1750. Obviously it's a reproduction, it can't be original.

This is the courtyard of the church, with several colorful (lol) flowerbeds and the orthodox cathedral in the background, that was built centuries later.

And this is the place where the adventure for me began. This is the open corridor, it's like the first floor, so to speak. I've been always fascinated by this view, I mean of how the corridor narrows looking from where I was standing. Mayne this was not the best angle, because around halfway, there's convex part of the wall, that makes the corridor a bit strange.

Here I put my phone on the ground and tried to capture the corridor from another angle. I'm not satisfied with the result as I should have changed the angle a little bit, to not capture so much of the floor and focus on the corridor and the roof. Lesson for next time.

Same here. Maybe I should go back and do a proper photo shoot, this time paying more attention to these details. The good thing is I'm constantly learning, to improve my skills.

It was a fun experience and now I know where I need to improve my skills. Hopefully the next photo shoot will be better and more exciting.