The Mihai Eminescu House (Casa Mihai Eminescu) is an early-19th-century house on Strada Mitropoliei in Sibiu, standing between the Faculty of Theology Saint Andrei Șaguna and the Metropolitanate of Transylvania. Its name commemorates a short stay by Mihai Eminescu in 1868, while the building later became home to a collection of Orthodox icons and church objects.
Eminescu arrived in Sibiu as part of Mihai Pascaly’s traveling theater company and stayed in the house from June 18 to 30, 1868, several years before establishing himself as one of Romania’s major literary figures. A commemorative plaque added to the façade in 1964 records the visit and remains the clearest feature for visitors identifying the house from the street.
The house continued to be used by people involved in Sibiu’s educational and cultural life around the turn of the 20th century. Victor Tordașianu, Daniil Popovici Barcianu and Gustav Bedeus von Scharberg all lived here for periods, while the pedagogical journal Vatra Școlară had its editorial office in the building between 1907 and 1914. Four carved stone crosses from the 18th century, brought from the cemetery of the Annunciation Church at Broșteni, are preserved in the courtyard.
After the house passed into the care of the Orthodox Archdiocese, it was renovated under Metropolitan Antonie Plămădeală and adapted in 1983 for a museum of icons and church objects. The collection includes icons painted on wood and glass, liturgical vessels, crosses, religious books in Romanian and Church Slavonic, and other objects from Orthodox worship. A specialist inventory records more than 500 icons in the collection, with examples from the 18th and 19th centuries among its strongest groups.
While the house still contains the icon and church-object collection, it does not operate as a regular walk-in museum and visits are arranged on request.
