Go back 500 years to the heyday of mining in Banská Bystrica and its surroundings
The permanent THURZO – FUGGER Experience Exposure in the Barbican, in the area of the city castle, brings closer the mining history of Banská Bystrica and the surrounding villages and towns, especially from the times of the famous Thurzo-Fugger company and the Copper Hammer. An exciting tour will take you back 500 years to the heyday of mining in Banská Bystrica and its surroundings.
A timeline with augmented reality on smartphones guides you through the exhibition through individual stages of the region's mining history. Important personalities from the given time talk about their lives, work, contacts, and historical connections, which gave rise to the largest business enterprise in the world at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries. A bronze-age miner, the first mayor of Banská Bystrica Ondrej, Ján Thurzo and Jakob Fugger, key personalities of the Banská Bystrica media company, will talk to you through "talking pictures". You can look into the gallery directly in the exhibition, and far beyond the walls of the City Castle, you will learn how and what the richest man in the world got rich, or what copper meant to people and what it was used for from prehistoric times to the present day.
Thanks to the most modern technologies, the exposure will give you a unique experience. Through a motion platform and virtual reality, you will "walk" through the production premises of the Copper Hammer and see how it looked and functioned in its heyday. A lot of information about the development of mining and mining machines, about various subjects related to this topic, or a lot of other interesting information will be conveyed to you by touch screens, to the current Copper Hammer, even more than 500 years ago, we will take you with the help of a 360° video projection...
The exposure will also direct you to other places in Banská Bystrica and the surrounding villages where you can choose to learn about mining history in our region (Špania Dolina, Staré Hory, Moštenica, Ľubietová, Tajov, Malachov...). The exposure was also inspired by the international project European Fugger Road, whose partners are, in addition to Banská Bystrica, the cities of Augsburg and Bad Hindelang from Germany, Schwaz and Hall in Tirol from Austria, and Sterzing from Italy.
