Our address is Strada Apollonia Hirscher 12. The name belongs to the richest woman of medieval Brașov — and to a story that resembles ours rather closely.
Apollonia was from Sibiu. She married Lucas Hirscher, a merchant and judge of Brașov, and when he died in 1541 she took over the family business herself. She carried it as far as Austria and the Ottoman Empire, in a world where trade was men's work.
In 1545 she gave eight thousand florins for the building of the Merchants' House: sixty-seven metres of tall arcades, vaulted rooms and an inner courtyard where goods were unloaded. A covered market, under a single roof, for the city's fifty guilds. She died two years later.
It is said — and this is legend, not history — that she raised it in thanksgiving. Her daughter, given up for dead some days earlier, is said to have woken when thieves tried to pull the rings from her fingers. The two women appear in a fresco on Michael Weiss street, a few steps from our Degusteria.
A woman who built a house so the city's craftsmen could work under the same roof. Compagnia di Famiglia means, word for word, the family's company.
We are not in that building — the Merchants' House is elsewhere on the street today. But the name on the plaque at the entrance is hers, and when we moved here we did not choose the address for the story. We learned it afterwards.
