The town’s own tourist information centre states the system plainly: “a wall 930 m long, 14 defence towers and 5 artillery bastions”, built and defended by the guilds. It went up between the 14th and 17th centuries against Ottoman raiding, starting around 4 m high and raised in places to about 14 m. Nine of the fourteen towers survive, which is why Sighișoara is the citadel people are sent to rather than one of the other six Saxon towns.
The arrangement is the interesting part and it is not decorative. A guild bought and maintained its own tower, stored its powder and weapons in it and put its own men on the wall there. Craft, defence and citizenship were the same thing. If a trade shrank, its stretch of wall shrank with it.
Three to find. The Tailors’ Tower (Turnul Croitorilor), 14th-century, stands at the far side of the citadel from the Clock Tower and holds the second gate: two vaulted passages you still walk through to get in and out. Its powder magazine blew up in the fire of 1676 and the north gate vault was rebuilt as late as 1935. The Tinsmiths’ Tower (Turnul Cositorarilor) is the strangest object on the wall — 25 m high, square at the base, pentagonal above that, then suddenly octagonal near the top, heavily rebuilt in 1583, and pocked with bullet marks from the siege of 1704–06. It is joined to the Tanners’ Tower by the Galeria Arcașilor, the archers’ gallery, the one place where the wall still reads as a fighting platform. The Ropemakers’ Tower (Turnul Frânghierilor) sits up by the Church on the Hill, rebuilt in 1350 after the Tatar invasion, and is the only one of the nine that is lived in: the caretaker of the Saxon cemetery has it. Look, and do not knock.
The others, in one pass: the Butchers’ (later 15th century, hexagonal so it could fire in every direction), the Furriers’ (probably 15th century, square, four storeys, heightened after 1676), the Bootmakers’ (first documented 1594, burnt out in 1676, rebuilt from the foundations in 1681, hexagonal with unequal sides), the Blacksmiths’ (1631, on the footings of the older Barbers’ Tower) and the small square Tanners’ Tower of the 13th–14th centuries. None of them is open inside.
