The best hikes from bus stations in Cluj

Unity Square (Piața Unirii) is the heart of Cluj-Napoca. At 220 by 160 metres, it is one of the largest urban squares in the country. It is dominated by a number of historic buildings such as St. Michael's Church or Banffy Palace, as well as the Matthias Corvinus Monument in its centre. There are paid parking spaces and public toilets here. The remains of Roman buildings (Vestigii romane) can be seen under a glass cover.

The Cluj-Napoca City Hall was built at the end of the 19th century according to the plans of Ignác Alpár. With its Viennese Baroque-style façade and corner bell tower with clock, the building was initially the seat of the Royal Hungarian government of the Kolozs region (Cluj-Napoca is called Kolozsvár in Hungarian). With around 325,000 inhabitants, Cluj-Napoca is the second largest city in Romania and the largest city in Transylvania.

The "Casa Matei Corvin" is the birthplace of the future Hungarian king. It is the oldest secular building in the city, built in the 15th century in the Gothic style as a small guesthouse. Matthias Corvinus ("the Raven") was born here on February 23, 1443. He ascended the Hungarian throne in 1458 at the age of fourteen. In gratitude for the hospitality that the house owner Jakab Méhffi had once shown his heavily pregnant mother, King Matthias decreed in 1467 that Méhffi and all his descendants were exempt from all taxes and duties. Over the course of its history, the house served as a prison, hospital and museum. Today it houses an institute for fine arts at the local art and design college.

The music school is housed in the former monastery next to the Franciscan church. The monastery was founded in 1442 under the aegis of the Dominicans, probably on the ruins of a Roman temple. When the Catholic religious orders were expelled by the Protestants in March 1556, the building was no longer used for religious purposes. The Hungarian Queen Izabella lived here until 1557, after which the place was converted into a school. In 1693, under pressure from the House of Habsburg, the church and monastery were returned to the Catholic Church and used by the Jesuits. Their Jesuit school existed here until 1725, after which the Franciscans returned to the city. Inside the monastery there was a famous library, the collection of which included more than a thousand volumes. After the communist authorities abolished the religious orders, the "music school" was located in the monastery building, from which the "Sigismund Toduță Music School" emerged, which still exists today.

On the site of the first Christian church in Cluj from the 11th century, which was destroyed during the great Tartar invasion in 1241, the current Franciscan church was built between 1260 and 1290 in the late Romanesque style. The church and its monastery were initially used by Dominican monks. When the Catholics returned after the Reformation, the Franciscans began the restoration of the church in 1728, building the tower of the west façade in the Baroque style and providing the interior with a Baroque vault at a lower level than the old Gothic ceiling, which had collapsed at that time. The construction work was completed in 1745.

Since 1968, the Carolina Obelisk has stood in the middle of Museum Square in front of the Franciscan Church, after it was moved here from Unirii Square. Abraham Cürös and Samuel Nagy created this oldest secular monument in the city. The occasion was the visit of the Austro-Hungarian imperial couple Franz I and his fourth wife Karoline Auguste. They had travelled to Klausenberg in 1917 to calm the waves that the city had suffered during the famines caused by the Napoleonic Wars. However, the emperor and his wife did not get to see the obelisk, whose corners are accentuated by four eagles with laurel leaves. It was not completed until much later and inaugurated in 1831.

From Unirii Square, Strada Matei Corvin leads to the birthplace of this former Hungarian king. The cobbled street is flanked by restaurants and pubs that, when the weather is nice, have tables set up outside for their guests and attract them with elaborate lighting from hundreds of light bulbs.

The building known as the Petrechevich-Horvath House has housed the National Museum of Transylvanian History since 1937, the successor to the first museum association in Transylvania, the Ardeeab Nzsezn Society founded in 1872. It is a museum of history and archaeology. The collections are arranged chronologically and give the visitor a good insight into historical development. The museum has objects from prehistory, the Dacian Middle Ages in Transylvania, the Roman period in Dacia, the Middle Ages and the modern era.