Alchemist’s Laboratory

The side passages house the Alchemist's Laboratory, dedicated to Hans Schärffenberg. The setting evokes a man who worked as both an apothecary and an alchemist. In the local story, he sought a substance that would prolong life, but instead obtained arsenic trioxide. This belongs to the tale of his alchemical quest, while the economic importance of his work lay in developing a method of processing arsenic ores.

Arsenic trioxide production became a new direction for mining in Złoty Stok. After numerous experiments, Schärffenberg developed a process for recovering it from arsenic ores. The workshop's story therefore concerns a different product from the gold symbolised in the nearby treasury. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, arsenic trioxide became the main product, with gold and arsenic mining sharing the history of these workings.