The Hermes House (Casa Hermes) is a 19th-century historic building between the Small Square and Albert Huet Square in Sibiu, built between 1865 and 1867 for the Citizens’ and Craftsmen’s Association. Its neo-Gothic façades face both squares, while the building has since served a succession of commercial, cultural and museum uses.
The present house replaced an older property that had included the Golden Stag inn and restaurant. After the Citizens’ and Craftsmen’s Association acquired the site in 1865, builder Gärtner created a new headquarters with offices, a library, training rooms for apprentices and spaces for exhibitions of craft products. Shops occupied the ground floor from the beginning, including booksellers, stationery and musical-instrument shops, cloth merchants and later leather businesses.
The neo-Gothic design is almost symmetrical toward both squares, with seven bays on each façade and stepped central gables flanked by small turrets. A vaulted passage leads through the building, while the interior is arranged around a small courtyard covered by a glass roof. The basement preserves traces of the medieval house that previously stood here as well as part of Sibiu’s earliest fortified enclosure.
During the interwar period, the Huet Square side housed Carol Kovats’s Volksbierhalle (People’s Beer Hall), which moved to Nicolae Bălcescu Street in 1939. The same year it was replaced by the Henric Hermes Brewery Restaurant, from which the building ultimately inherited the name Hermes House.
In 1993, the building became home to ASTRA Museum’s Franz Binder Museum of Universal Ethnography, which presented collections from cultures outside Europe. It is now the headquarters of ASTRA Film, the documentary-film department of the ASTRA Museum, and functions as the venue of the internationally recognized Astra Film Festival and other documentary screenings and events.
