In the commune of Baia de Criș, Hunedoara, you can visit the Avram Iancu house museum, of Crăișorului Muntilor, as it is called. The national hero was found breathless right on the porch of this house, which is why the house is a museum and not a memorial and is supposed to be the place where Avram Iancu was born, that is in Vidra de Sus, in Alba County.
Practically, this place stays in everyone's memory as the place of Crăișor's death, intertwining here the local history, with the facts and events that contributed to the completion of the national history, practically. The house consists of two interior rooms and a porch. The history room which presents the revolutionary activities of Avram Iancu and the ethnography room which depicts a peasant-mottled interior are both center pieces.
The porch of the house symbolizes the place of tragedy, here Avram Iancu was found dead on the morning of September 11th, 1872. Next to him was found the whistle that was inseparable from him in the last years of his life, and in the pocket of his coat was found a letter that, years ago, he wanted to send it to Emperor Franz Joseph.
Iancu's revolutionary activity, presented in one of the rooms
The house where Avram Iancu passed away was rebuilt in the summer of 2003, in the town of Baia de Cris, located about 55 kilometers away from Brad. The inauguration of this museum house took place in September 2003, on the occasion of the National Celebrations in Țebea. This Avram Iancu House-Museum symbolically reproduces the former bakery of Ioan Stupină called Lieber, on the porch of which the great hero found his end.
Inside, the house-museum consists of two rooms. The first is the history room where the revolutionary activity of Avram Iancu is presented, starting with the Assembly from Blaj. Aspects from the great battles for the defense of the Apuseni Mountains are exposed through photographs of the revolutionary prefects, photographs of weapons and fighters, sketches of the battles of 1849, photocopies of letters and documents.
Avram Iancu is represented after the revolution until the funeral in Ţebea, in the Monumente Complex, where the Crăișor tomb is located. Images of the numerous victims of the repression, robbery and theft by Hungarian troops are presented, as well as documents about the memory of Avram Iancu in the consciousness of posterity, publications with signs about Avram Iancu and some fragments from Horea's Gorun.
Objects of local ethnography, exhibited here
In the second room of the House-Museum, pieces of local ethnography are exhibited. Many of these ethnographic objects exhibited here bear the imprint of the Romanian tricolor. For example, under the painting representing Avram Iancu, there is a wool blanket, woven in the three national colors, red, yellow and blue, which the hero sat on when he participated in an event in Ţebea.
Also unique are the two paintings depicting Crăișorul Muntilor entirely dressed in royal robes, paintings which are rarely publicized. There is also the traditional tulnic, received from a nephew of Iancu.
Avram Iancu was born in 1824, died in Vidra de Susși on September 10, 1872, in Baia de Cris. Crăișorul Muntilor was a Transylvanian lawyer and Romanian Pasoptist revolutionary, who played an important role in the 1848 Revolution in Transylvania. He was the leader of Wallachia in 1849, commanding the army of the Transylvanian Romanians, in alliance with the Austrian army, against the Hungarian revolutionary troops under the leadership of Lajos Kossuth.
foto source: MCDR Deva