The oldest pharmacy in Cluj and one of its newest galleries are in the same house

The Hintz House, sometimes called the Mauksch-Hintz House, is a listed monument on Piața Unirii at number 28, on the corner of Strada Regele Ferdinand — the former Bridge Lane. The city's first public pharmacy opened inside it in 1573.

It has four windows onto the square and a longer wing of six windows along Bridge Lane. The steep roof structure gives away an old construction; Renaissance elements survive only in a few ground-floor rooms, in the narrow courtyard and in the cellar.

Around 1820 the front was reworked in a classicising style. In the mid-twentieth century it was returned to its plainer look, which shows its real age far better.

From 1752 the building was let to private pharmacists. The first tenant was Tobias Mauksch, who came from Bistrița and was at the same time a dignitary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Cluj — the church across the street.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the house and the pharmacy passed to the Hintz family, who kept them until nationalisation after the Second World War. The name stayed.

The Pharmacy Museum, at Piața Unirii 28, a section of the National Museum of Transylvanian History. Open Tuesday–Sunday, 10:00–18:00; closed Monday. Phone: +40 744 787 233. It scores 4.7 on Google from 559 reviews, and the listing is claimed by the institution — which, as we found out by measuring, is rarer than it ought to be.

Centrul de Interes, at Regele Ferdinand 1. Tuesday–Friday 11:00–13:30 and 15:00–18:30, Saturday 14:00–17:00. Five reviews.

The Pharmacy Museum: 720 searches a month in Romania, 390 in Cluj, 559 reviews.

Centrul de Interes, in the same house: 260 searches, five reviews.

A hundred and eleven times more reviews for the pharmacy than for the gallery, at the same postal address. That is not a question of quality, nor even of promotion — it is the difference between a four-hundred-and-fifty-year-old landmark and a recently opened contemporary art space.

Still, it is worth saying: whoever walks through one door is a few metres from the other, and almost nobody knows it. A guide can fix precisely that much.