Reformed Church and 

The religious building, the Reformed Church, although currently without parishioners, remains a symbol of the community. Due to its location, at the intersection with an alley leading to the Unitarian Church, the Reformed Church is easily visible, especially from the hillside part.. Together with the two nearby churches - the Unitarian and the Roman Catholic, the Reformed Church serves as a landmark in the urban structure of the locality.

The simplicity of its architectural forms and the widespread use of construction techniques do not allow for precise dating, which is estimated between  1800 - 1848. The church walls are built of mixed stone and brick masonry with a thickness of 1 meter. Access to the church is through the ground floor of a bell tower, included in the nave's plan. The plasticity of the interior space, sober and simple, is complemented by some furniture elements: a wooden pulpit placed in the axis of the apse and 2 blocks of benches with desks, with sides decorated with applied palmettes. On the northwest wall, there is an extended gallery with a wooden parapet. Access to the bell tower is from this gallery where a bell dating back to 1833 is located.

The Reformed Church is located on one of the village's most important streets where wealthy members of the community lived. On the facades of the houses here, you will notice the mining symbol - the hammer and crossed pickaxes. What you can also notice about these houses is that they have a door from the basement to the street so that miners could easily deposit their gold ore, which many of them processed in the basement of their homes. So, after these doors, there was usually a cellar with a water source where the miner washed the ore during winter when the stamp mills could no longer operate. Most of the time, a grinder was installed in the basement. The grinder, an essential tool in processing gold-rich ore, was mainly used during the winter when the water in the ponds which generated the stamp mills would freeze. It was placed on a pedestal, usually in the cellar of the house. With the help of the grinder, the rich ore, which contained significant amounts of gold and was removed from the mine with sacks, was ground. Within 2-3 hours, approximately 30-40 kg of ore could be ground. The lower part of the grinder, was used to raise or lower the movable stone depending on the amount of ore and the fineness at which it was ground.

Usually, the grinder was used in secret to not reveal to the holongars (gold thieves) the wealth of gold in the mine, but sometimes this activity was performed visibly to show off the large amount of gold found. After grinding, the movable stone was raised, and the mixture of ground ore and gold amalgam was collected with a cloth. Using the sieve, it was checked if there were any traces of gold or particles in the water flowing from the grinder. The amalgam was washed with water until it became clean, then it was placed in a dense cloth and squeezed to remove excess water. By treating it with mercury, an amalgam ball was obtained, which was placed in a pan and burned until it turned red like embers, resulting in burnt gold or trapped gold.

You have listened to the content dedicated to Rosia Montana’s Reformed Church and the gold miners houses.

The UNESCO tour of Rosia Montana is a project implemented by the non-governmental organization ‘Rosia Montana in Patrimoniul Mondial’. The audio-tour is co-financed by Romania’s Administration for National Cultural Funds. We based our story telling on local anecdotes and the works listed on the bibliography on our website. We encourage you to follow the trail that we prepared for you via our website. This will ensure that you discover all objects and their stories of Rosia Montana. Have a pleasant journey and ‘drum bun’ as we say here.