The reassembled classroom
Wooden benches from the early 1900s.
Suradnik13 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Mike is Michi — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Marko Jukić -Majkl — CC BY-SA 4.0 · unknown (foto Roberta.) — Public domain
The Croatian School Museum is among the oldest museums of education in Europe: founded in 1901, when the history of schooling was not considered a museum subject, and housed in the historic Teachers' Building on one of the Green Horseshoe squares. The collection covers education in Croatia from the medieval period to the present: old textbooks, certificates, registers, writing instruments, teaching maps, classroom furniture and a large collection of photographs of schools and teachers. It includes a reassembled classroom from the start of the twentieth century with its wooden benches. Its real value is not nostalgia but what it reveals: curricula that changed with every regime the country passed through — Austro-Hungarian, then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, then the wartime state, then socialist Yugoslavia, then independent Croatia. A textbook is a political document, and this museum shows that plainly.
Wooden benches from the early 1900s.
Political documents as much as teaching ones.
Trg Mazuranica 18, 10000 Zagreb
The Ethnographic MuseumZagreb's Ethnographic Museum occupies a former stock exchange building of the ea2 minutes walk4.4
The Orthodox Cathedral of the TransfigurationThe Serbian Orthodox cathedral in Zagreb, on Preradović Square in the city centr6 minutes walk4.6
The Botanical GardenZagreb's botanical garden dates from 1889 and is one link in the Green Horseshoe6 minutes walk4.7
Zrinjevac & the Green HorseshoeZrinjevac is Zagreb's green salon: first garden of the Lenuci Horseshoe — seven 7 minutes walk4.9
Jelačić Square & Dolac MarketJelačić Square is Croatia's point zero: every rendezvous is under the horse's ta8 minutes walk4.6For anyone interested in social history or in education professionally, and for anyone wanting to understand how a national identity is manufactured. It is not a museum for a two-day visitor to Zagreb — the major sights have a better claim on that time. But it is among the best ways to fill a third or fourth day, particularly as it is minutes from the botanical garden and the Mimara museum on the same route.