Brasov, a tour of schools

As I had said before, I love free walking tours. I took the one in Brasov. Our tour guide was Elena, and she was with the same company that did my two tours in Bucharest. The tour was not listed as a tour of schools, but we did see a lot of them - so why not dedicate a blog post to them!




This school is the country's best sports high school. The Olympic gymnasts, for which Romania is so well known, all received their education here. Although it is a high school, I saw kids of all ages training on the track.




This school was the first German school in the country. In this part of Romania, many of the early inhabitants were Saxons. Today this is the German high school, next door is the German primary school and nearby is the German Kindergarten. The classes in these schools are taught entirely in German and the Romanian children who attend leave fully bilingual.



This is the Andrei Saguna High School. It is currently the best (academically) HS in Brasov. It's founding has a unique tale. During medeival times, Brasov was a city made up of three groups that lived within it's walls: Saxons, Carpathians and Hungarians. The Romanians were treated as second class people and forbidden to live within the protection of the city walls. This went on for centuries. After a time, the Romanians wanted a high school to educate their youth, so they spoke to the Saxon priest, Andrei Saguna, but he refused to help them, however when they told him that they would just go ask the Hungarians, all of a sudden Saguna was willing to help. Not only did he get their high school built, but after his death he was given sainthood - one reason being these actions! This school is just outside of the old walls of town.


This beautiful building next to the Andrei Saguna HS was originally built to house the teachers who taught at the school. The idea at the time was that teachers were unmarried individuals who had no reason to stray far from the school. The teachers had strict rules and a curfew. Now a days, many teachers still live here, but they are free to come and go as they please!




This school is on the grounds of the St. Nicolae Church. This was the very first school in Romania. At the time this school was built, the ideas of education were much different. One started school around the age of 20. The amount of time one attended this school ranged from 3 months to 9 months. If you attended for 3 months, you qualified as a notary. If you attended for 6 months, you qualified as a teacher. If you attended for 9 months, you qualified as a priest. Attendance was not something taken lightly, as it was very expensive to attend. Often whole towns contributed money to send one young man to school so that they might have a notary, teacher or priest.


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Location:Brasov, Romania