Piarist High School is an architectural ensemble in Timișoara, originally intended for the high school established by the Piarist Order. The Secession-style ensemble, comprising a high school, a chapel church and a boarding school, was designed by and opened in 1909. After World War II, some faculties of the Timișoara Polytechnic School functioned here. Gerhardinum, the high school of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Timișoara, is currently operating here. The ensemble is inscribed in the list of historical monuments in Romania.
History
Piarist High School
In Central Europe, there were Piarist schools in six provinces ("ordinariates"): Austria, Bohemia-Moravia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. The first Piarist school in Transylvania was the gymnasium founded in 1717 in Bistrița. It was followed by those from Carei and Sighetu Marmației. Cluj also boasted a Piarist institution.
In Banat, the activity of monk-teachers began in 1747 when the Serbian nobleman Iacob Bibici and his wife Margareta Tomian built a church and a monastery on their estate in Sântana, which in 1750 they donated, together with the sum of 15,000 Rhenish florins, to the Piarist Order, for them to set up a gymnasium there. The gymnasium was inaugurated in 1751 with three classes: lower, middle and upper. The classes were apparently run by Bulgarian monks at first, but soon priest-teachers trained in several languages were called up here. From the very beginning classes were taught in all the languages spoken then in the empire, providing a revolutionary system for the teaching methods of the 18th century. In 1772, two more classes were added, the fourth and the fifth, which, together with three classes of the primary school, formed the eight classes of education of the time. 1784 brings the closure of the boarding school next to the school, by order of the emperor, and in 1788 the school premises are requisitioned for the military hospital of the Timișoara garrison. In the short time in Sântana, an estimated 17,000 students from all over the region attended school.
According to an imperial patent of Emperor Joseph II, the order will be established in Timișoara from 1788, where shortly after arrival they will have to transform the school they ran into an eight-grade gymnasium. As previously said, the Jesuits already had a church and a school in Timișoara, built in 1726, somewhere in the perimeter delimited by the north side of the Liberty Square and on the current Emanuil Ungureanu Street, but the number of students was very small. In 1769 there were only 20 students in all six classes. In 1778 the gymnasium was closed, after the abolition of the Jesuit Order in 1773. Franciscans from Bosnia built a Baroque church between 1733 and 1736. After the arrival of the Piarists, the activity of the Franciscans decreases, and their church becomes the property of the Piarists, who will use it until 1911, when it will be demolished, and in its place the Palace of the Credit Bank will be built next year.
The language of instruction was initially, for a short time, Latin. But, by a decree of Joseph II, German was imposed as the official language of the high school. From the middle of the 19th century until the end of World War I, classes were taught in Hungarian, and from 1920 the teaching system in Romanian was applied. At the beginning of the 19th century, there were few Romanian students in high school, but this situation may also be due to the fact that they were Orthodox and, by order of the Serbian patriarch Stefan Stratimirović, Orthodox students could not enroll in German schools unless they had Serbian names.
In 1802, the sixth grade was added to the Piarist gymnasium, which operated in the Catholic seminary. Since 1841 it has been elevated to the rank of high school (upper gymnasium). In 1850 it became a complete high school (with eight classes). At that time the high school had 12 teachers, a physics laboratory, a mineralogy collection and a herbarium. In the school year 1852–1853, the high school had 184 students, of whom 41 were Germans, 66 Hungarians, 45 Serbs, 26 Romanians, 4 Croats, and 2 Slovenes. Among the high school students was the future writer Ioan Slavici, who attended the sixth and seventh grades of high school here between 1865 and 1867.