Zagreb Attractions

Venue: Ethnographic Museum    When: Daily; not Mon

The Ethnographic Museum in Zagreb is one of the most important museums in the city.

The museum was founded in 1919 by Salomon Berger, a textile trader and manufacturer from Slovakia, and is situated in an art-déco palace built in 1903 in Mazuranic Square. It has been run by numerous prominent figures in Croatian ethnography and museology, such as Vladimir Tkalcic, Milovan Gavazzi and Jelka Radaus-Ribaric.

Generations of experts have systematically collected about 80,000 items from all over Croatia as well as neighbouring and non-European countries. The major part of the museum holdings consists of textile items (folk costumes, applied handicraft), but there are also collections illustrating traditional housekeeping customs, crafts, handicraft and others. It is also home to valuable collections of items belonging to non-European traditional cultures from many continents, mostly presented to the museum at the end of the 19th century by Croatian explorers and travellers such as Dragutin Lerman and brothers Mirko and Stevo Seljan.

There is also a significant archive of inventory data, photographs and drawings, a library with more than 11,000 items and restoration workshops which successfully handle the complex procedure of renovation and conservation of the exhibits.