The Sabbatarian Simon Péchi was arrested in May 1621 by then-Prince Gabriel Bethlen and spent three years in Szamosújvár Prison.

[1] In 1785, Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor decreed it as the central prison for Transylvania, and it opened in 1787.

Other changes included turning the provisions office and guard commander’s residence near the gate into a meeting hall for cadres; and closing the two churches (Orthodox and Greek-Catholic) on the prison ground floor, making them into a kitchen.

After the 1817 visit of Emperor Francis II, a cloth factory opened, employing all able-bodied prisoners until 1840.

The teachers and the students aged 18 and older were drafted into World War I, when the building housed wounded troops.

From 1940, after the Second Vienna Award returned the area to Hungary, it held common criminals; these were freed upon the end of Hungarian rule in 1944.

[6] In June 1950, a group of torturers arrived at Gherla from Pitești, the site of a wide-ranging experiment in “re-education”.

During the preceding fourteen months, Țanu, his adjunct and rival at Pitești, had won the respect of the Gherla administration.

[7] Room 99, isolated from the other cells, was very spacious; prisoners would sit around the edges, with the torturers guarding the exits.

Whoever complained to the guards would immediately be beaten, stripped naked, chained to the solitary confinement cell, constantly having cold water poured on him and left to hunger for days on end.

That December, Țurcanu and ten associates, believing they were on the way to Aiud in order to continue the process there, were in fact transported to Jilava for interrogation.

[7] With the end of "re-education" came a new warden, the notorious Petrache Goiciu, who quickly turned the prison into a place of hard work and violence.

Developing an obsession with the imprisoned politician, Goiciu would start screaming at him whenever he found Flueraș outside his assigned area.

One night shortly thereafter, he was moved into a ground-floor cell, where three ex-"re-educators" beat him until morning with their fists, broomsticks, boots and sandbags.

In August 1949, on orders from Alexandru Nicolschi, seven members of the anti-communist resistance movement were removed from the prison on pretext of being transferred, and shot in an unknown location.

A group of resisters led by Iosif Capotă and Alexandru Dejeu [ro], both National Peasants' Party activists who had emerged as anti-communists during the 1946 election before continuing their activity underground for a number of years, was arrested starting in December 1957.

The disturbance was quickly put down by the authorities, and the rebellious inmates were subjected to terrible beatings and torture;[10] twenty-two of them received sentences of five to fifteen years.

[11] In an interview with Adevărul, an ex-detainee, Constantin Vlasie, recounts how the guards at Gherla Prison "were evil.

"[12] Another ex-prisoner, Mihai Stăuceanu (arrested for being a border-jumper), recalls: "The detention regime at Gherla was probably very similar to the extermination regime applied in the Nazi camps: 10 to 12 hours of physical work on a construction site, which was cordoned off with double fences of barbed-wire and with guarding towers, exactly like those to be found at the border.