3.The old officina

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The old Officina is where medicines were sold during the 18th century. It is a representative room, very decorated with painting and an inscription boasting the privileged status of the owner, Tobias Mauksch. Subsequently, in the ownership of the Hintz family, the officina was moved to the rooms parallel to the main square and this room was used as an office. The family added a new inscription, listing the long series of owners and thus suggesting the solidity and prosperity of the pharmacy.

The most important element of decoration is the painting of the vault, created right after the middle of the eighteenth century. This is a rare example of lay Baroque painting preserved in the city, adapted to the room’s function: the medallions contain symbols of pharmacy such as the snakes of Aesculapius on the Tree of Life, the stork with a rock in its claws, a symbol of vigilance, and the horns of plenty, symbols of abundance and, in a wider sense, health.

The furniture and the jars were used in other pharmacies from Transylvania. The numerous apothecary containers on display were impressive through shape, decoration and the inscriptions in Latin that proved the pharmacist's erudition. Naturally, the main function of these inscriptions was to indicate the content of the jars, that was either apothecary ingredients or intermediate products such as bases for unguents or elixirs. The apothecary jars were made of different materials – pottery, wood, metal and glass – clear, milky and colored in order to protect the contents from intense light.