The Sisters of Notre-Dame Monastery and School

At the Catholic bishop Csajághy’s invitation, the first six sisters arrived in Timişoara in 1858. They were brought from Munich because the order had made itself known in Bavaria by the quality of education offered to girls.

Already in 1858 a boarding school was opened in the monastery. But the settlement was extremely poor, and the nuns worked to exhaustion; the head (the mother superior) of the monastery died just four months after arrival. In 1862, the present building was inaugurated, and the order, and together with it, the educational activities began to develop rapidly.

Of the girls in Timişoara, more and more began to enter the order of the sisters of Notre Dame. Therefore, the order’s continuity in the city was provided both from arrivals of some sisters from Germany and from the new enrollments from the local community. New schools opened in Fabric and Iosefin districts.

The end of the Sisters of Notre Dame order came rapidly with the establishment of communism in 1948. They were forbidden to work – teach in schools, and throughout the country all Catholic nuns had to move into house arrest. The Sisters of Notre Dame initially went to the Maria Radna monastery, but in 1952 they had to move even from there – some to Oraştie, others on a farm at Popesti-Leordeni, near Bucharest. The ones near Bucharest had a sad fate – during winter it used to get so cold, that water would freeze in rooms.

Practically, this was the end of a religious community that was very much involved in the youth’s education in Timişoara.