Golden Eagle Pharmacy Museum

The Golden Eagle Pharmacy Museum in Buda Castle is a tiny, but endearing museum, not only for medicinal people, but also recommended for those, who like alchemy, the Middle Ages and pre-modern medicine as well as mystery and dark science.

The museum is known in Hungarian as the Aranysas Patika Muzeum: a collection of unusual items, bowls, herbs, books of the history of medicine dating back to the 1600’s.
The displays include a wide range of serious and surprising items, from Hungarian chemists’ history relics, to dried bats or tiny crocodiles in jars, herbs used for curing. The museum also represents the development of the science of medicine and pharmacy in the Middle Ages.

The Alchemy Lab is set up with original furnishings, a replica of a fireplace and a cooking area, which looks exactly like a place where an alchemist would have worked in the 17th century.

History of Golden Eagle Pharmacy Museum

The building of the Golden Eagle Pharmacy Museum was used as a merchant’s house in the 15th century. Then, an alchemist moved in to the house in the 1730s – 1750s, naming the place Golden Eagle and establishing the first professional pharmacy in Buda. The bottom floor of the building was always used for trading purposes.
The building survived the turmoils of the Buda Castle battles, the 16th century Turkish siege, the 17th century Austrian conquest, the Nazi then Soviet battles in WW2. Although, the idea for establishing a museum of this kind already emerged in 1905, the actual realization only took place in 1973 when the Museum was opened as one of the departments of a the national medical university, Semmelweis University.

As for the architecture of the museum, the facade of the building is Neo-Classical while the interior was built in Baroque Style. Different phases of the history of architecture are clearly visible here, such as a blind box from the Renaissance age, or light boxes from the age of Turks.  The interior, the ceramics, wood, the scales and other ornamented tools are worthy pieces of both the Hungarian and the universal artistic heritage.