|
|
The History of the Museum
On December 12th 1904 the Karlovac Town Council agreed on the decision to found the Town Museum so that, according to the reasons given by the Council, all mementoes and antiques of the town should be preserved. Nevertheless, it was not until 1911 that a “Museum Committee” of fifteen members was elected. It sent out an appeal to the public for assistance in collecting objects, and the Museum was temporarily given a room at the Town Hall.
The first objects donated to the Museum included guild insignia; Mijo Balas’s numismatic collection; the collection of Janko Mikic, a member of the “Congo Expedition”; the archives of the Illyrian Reading-Room, various objects belonging to Hugo and Melkior Luksic (a wooden bicycle – velocipede) and so on. During World War I all the museum objects were stored in the attic of the Town Hall, and, in spite of a number of initiatives, the Museum’s activities lay dormant until the end of World War II.
On July 12th 1945 the Gallery was founded, and it was headed by the artists Nikola Dragaric and Branko Kozina, while true professionally based museum work began with Ivana Vrbanic in 1952. The following year the Museum was given the building on Strossmayer Square, where it is still located. (The building was built in the first half of the 17th century by Vuk Krsto Frankopan, a general from Karlovac, and it is now the oldest preserved example of a curiae built in the fortress in Karlovac – it has been designated as an exceptionally valuable cultural monument.) This baroque town palace is the site of the permanent museum exhibition, which was open in 1996 as a renewed exhibition from 1990. The exhibits show the type of flora and fauna of the Karlovac region with a special emphasis on ecological problems; they show the archeological past of the surrounding area; they illustrate the traditional way of life in the country; but for the most part they depict the history of the town from the founding of the Karlovac fortress, through its development as the centre of the Military Border to its status as a trading and transport hub in the 19th century and a cultural centre for the broader region.
The Museum is organised into departments covering natural science, archaeology, history, cultural history, ethnography, and, as we have already mentioned a gallery (located in a separate building) with total holdings of almost 18,000 objects.