Timișoara, the city kept at a distance by its own fortress

today

From Piața Unirii to Piața Traian you walk through a park and cross a canal#

Cetate (“the Fortress”, the old walled town), Fabric, Iosefin, Elisabetin and Mehala are districts of one city. Yet between Cetate, in the middle, and the others lies a wide band of parks, boulevards, campuses and sports grounds: between Piața Unirii, the main square of Cetate, and Piața Traian, the centre of Fabric, lie Parcul Regina Maria and the Bega canal. On the map the band is almost round.

Its shape comes from a military rule that held from the middle of the 18th century until 1892.

1853

The plan of 1853: a white star, an empty ring, the suburbs beyond it#

Johann Nepomuk Preyer, the mayor, published this plan in his 1853 monograph on the town. The fortress is left white, in the middle. Around it is green: pasture and drill ground. Only at the edge of the green do the coloured blocks begin, under the names on the plan: Fabrik (Fabric) to the east, Josephstadt (Iosefin) to the south-west, the Maierhöfe (later Elisabetin) to the south and the village of Mehala to the north-west.

Here the plan sits on today’s streets. It was fitted to the streets that already existed then, in all the suburbs at once. Fitted to Iosefin alone or to Mehala alone it would move by 12 m at most; to the Maierhöfe alone, by 19 m; to Fabric alone, by 36 m.

1853

The yellow line runs 500 Klafter from the fortress#

A yellow polygon runs round the fortress, with a small circle at each corner. The plan gives it no name. Measured on the plan’s own printed scale, the line lies 934 m from the outline of the fortifications; measured on today’s streets, 971 m. Between the two falls the military engineers’ round number: 500 Viennese Klafter of 1.896 m each, which is 948 m.

The name comes from an army plan of 1772: the “Esplanade”, drawn in red 500 Klafter out from the outer angles of the covered way, the sheltered path along the outer lip of the ditch, and marked on the ground with a wooden post at every corner. Inside it building was forbidden. Yet the same plan numbers, one by one, the houses and huts that stood there all the same, each with its owner and what it was built of.

Preyer’s text does not name the yellow line either. That it is the edge of the Esplanade follows from its distance, from its shape as a polygon with marked corners, and from the plan of 1772.

1853

The blocks stop at the line#

Of the area of coloured blocks on the plan, 3.5% falls inside the line: a few gardens with houses by the great bridge over the Bega and towards the Rosalia chapel. The rest begins where the Esplanade ends.

Most of the town lived outside the walls. In the census of 1851 the fortress held 4,574 people and Fabric 10,906: 53% of the town. Iosefin had 2,881, the Maierhöfe 2,199.

1788

The star of 1788: nine bastions, three lines of walls#

“Main plan of the fortress of Temeswar, with the surrounding country to 500 Klafter”, is the title of this plan, drawn and coloured by hand in 1788. The Habsburgs had taken Timișoara from the Ottomans in 1716 and rebuilt it as a star fortress. It had been finished in 1765, after more than four decades of work: the foundation stone was laid on 25 April 1723 and the ditch of the main enclosure was begun in 1732.

The plan is set on the streets of Cetate, which have not moved since. Huniade Castle is drawn 13 m from where it stands, and the surviving pieces of wall fall on the bastions and connecting walls they once belonged to. The belt of bastions and of the outworks in front of them, ravelins and counterguards, took up more ground than the town it defended.

1849

Why so much empty ground: the guns had to see#

A bastioned wall defends only if its artillery has a clear field; a house within range shelters the besieger. In the Maierhöfe houses were tolerated only provisionally, and their owners signed a “revers”: they accepted demolition on order, without compensation.

The rule was tested in 1849, when the army of the Hungarian revolution besieged the fortress from April to August. Preyer, mayor at the time, writes that the suburbs had come “in part onto the Esplanade” and helped the besiegers to approach. On 17 June the fortress guns fired 400–500 shells into Iosefin and the Maierhöfe. The brown lines on the plan are the trenches and batteries of that siege.

1869

Across the gap: roads winding between bastions, and a horse tram#

The gates were reached by narrow passages that wound round the bastions and by bridges over the ditches. Between Cetate and Iosefin there was a single road, which the railway crossed from 1857.

On 8 July 1869 a horse tram began to run between Piața Sfântul Gheorghe, in Cetate, and Fabric. For it the army allowed a third opening in the gates. The old road to Fabric, marked on the map, is today’s Bulevardul 3 August 1919.

1868

1868: the circle tightens to 300 Klafter#

At the town’s repeated request, an imperial resolution of 10 November 1868 cut the ban from 500 to 300 Klafter: 569 m. The ring thus freed, 200 Klafter wide, passed to the town, except for the great drill ground, which was also the fairground.

The War Ministry set a condition: new streets had to run radially, towards the fortress, so that they could be seen from the walls and swept by the guns along their whole length. An older duty of the town stayed too: the trees of any park on this ground were to be felled at the army’s demand in case of war, without compensation.

The date 10 November 1868 comes from Josef Geml, the town’s chief notary, who in the same text also mentions the year 1869.

today

The streets that aim at the fortress#

On today’s map, in the ring freed in 1868, 28.1% of the length of the streets aims at the fortress, within 15° either way. If streets pointed at random it would be 16.7%. On the map, red streets are radial and blue ones go round the fortress.

The condition of 1868 does not explain all of it, though. Just beyond the old 500-Klafter line, in suburbs older than the rule, the share is higher still: 32.8%. The old suburbs, too, point their streets at the fortress more often than chance would.

1892

1892: Timișoara stops being a fortress#

Permission to pull down the gates came first, in 1891, for the crowds of that year’s exhibition. In 1892 Emperor Franz Joseph lifted the town’s status as a fortress; the historian Ciprian Glăvan gives 23 April, following a monograph of 1902.

Long bargaining with the army followed, from 1893 to the contract of 15 June 1905. The town received 1,380,460 m² of ground, about 138 hectares, and paid in buildings put up for the army, which cost 2,307,588 crowns (the Austro-Hungarian korona).

Ciprian Glăvan (2013) and, after him, Wikipedia give 138,460 m², with a zero lost on the way: that would be less than the town inside the walls.

1898–1911

25,819,000 bricks#

Demolition began in 1898, on the bastions the army could spare, partly as winter work for the navvies. The great walls came down after the contract. By the end of 1911 they had yielded 25,819,000 whole bricks. More than 18 million were sold, at 20–24 crowns a thousand. In dwellings they were allowed, for reasons of health, only in the foundations.

The ground filled slowly. In 1910, 18 years after the fortress was decommissioned, not one dwelling yet stood on the ground of the fortifications. In 1911 the town built 163 new houses, 29 of them with two or three upper floors, along the new avenues.

today

What stands today in the ring where nothing was built#

Between the outline of the fortress and the old 500-Klafter line there are 3,163 buildings today. In the first 300 Klafter, though, 15.2% of the area is park: 51 hectares. In the next ring it is 2.2%; further out, 1.2%.

Parcul Central (Central Park) lies on the glacis, the bare earth slope in front of the ditch: the commander Anton Scudier had his soldiers level and plant the ground in the 1870s. Parcul Regina Maria, in front of Fabric, is the city’s oldest park. Six “palaces” of the Corso, the grand apartment blocks along today’s Piața Victoriei (Lloyd, Neuhausz, Dauerbach, Löffler, Hilt, Széchenyi), rose between 1910 and 1913 on the site of the walls, and the Metropolitan Cathedral, begun in 1936, closes the row to the south.

today

Fortress Boulevard, almost a kilometre from the fortress#

To the north-west, along the edge of Mehala, Bulevardul Cetății (“Fortress Boulevard”) is 3.25 km long. For 2.21 km of that it runs less than 60 m from the yellow line of 1853.

Closer in, Calea Circumvalațiunii, Bulevardul Vasile Pârvan and Bulevardul Corneliu Coposu go round the fortress 300–400 m from its old outline.

None of the sources below says the boulevard was laid out along the edge of the Esplanade on purpose. The overlap is what the map shows.

today

What is left of the wall#

The Theresia Bastion, the fortress’s provisions store, finished in 1734, is the only one kept almost whole. By Piața Timișoara 700 part of the Eugene Bastion still stands.

A little to the south, behind the old hospital of the Misericordian friars, now the eye clinic, is a piece of the curtain wall that joined the Eugene and Mercy bastions. It escaped demolition because it was part of the hospital building. Part of it was restored and opened in 2025 as an exhibition space, Cazemata 54.

Another stub of curtain, between the Eugene and Elisabeth bastions, stands in the Botanic Park, on the Strada Gheorghe Dima side. On Calea Alexandru Ioan Cuza a piece of the wall by the Vienna Gate survives.

The rest shows only on the map: the ring of boulevards, the parks, and the distance between the districts.