Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, visits regularly Romania, and particularly the Transylvanian region, where he also bought a house.
Few people know, however, that Charles traces his family roots back here. The crest of the Rhedey family, which gave one of his great-great-great grandmothers, stays on the walls of the Reformed Church in Cluj.
This is one of the protestant churches in Romania which hosted for the past three hundred years a collection of family crests relevant for both Romania and Hungary.
The Reformed Church in Cluj city - which traditionally has no images of saints adorning its walls, as other churches have - carries 119 crests of the Transylvanian nobility of past centuries, like the Banffy, Rhedey, Bethlen, Teleki, Kemeny or Apalfy.
The church was built between 1486 and 1510 by a Franciscan mason, who also erected two similar churches in Szeged and Nyirbaton, on orders from Matei Corvin, the Hungarian King. The first crest in the collection in the church in Cluj dates from 1666.
"These are actually burial symbols, carrying in the center the family crest and, on the sides, decorations of flowers, angels and skulls which are the symbols of death. The crests were used during the burial ceremony," explains Esther Szabo, the church guide.
The crests were placed in the burial chambers, with the coffins, where they were discovered in 1910, when the church was renovated.
The practice of burying the dead inside the church was banned during the reign of Austrain Emperress Maria Theresa, when all burial chambers were sealed, only to be reopened during the 1910 renovation. "This is how the crests were discovered and assembled into this collection, in 1913," explains Szabo.
Twelve obituaries also make part of the collection. They were printed by Mintalfalusi Kiss Mihlas, who studied in The Netherlands and
