Museum of Croatian Archaeological Monuments

The Museum of Croatian Archaeological Monuments is the only museum in Croatia entirely dedicated to the material culture of the early medieval Croatian state — the period from the arrival of the Croats in the 7th century to the formation of the Croatian-Hungarian kingdom in the 12th century. The collection includes jewellery, weapons, decorated stonework, and church furnishings from the formative era of Croatian identity.

The building itself, designed by Stjepan Planić and completed in the 1970s, is an interesting piece of late Yugoslav modernism — its concrete volume arranged around the collections in a sequence of different-sized spaces. It sits on the western edge of the city between Marjan Hill and the harbour, near the Meštrović Gallery. The two museums together make a half-day route through the western part of the city — starting at the Meštrović Gallery on the Marjan slopes and ending here near the sea.

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The collection focuses specifically on the period between the 7th and 15th centuries — the time when Croatian medieval statehood first emerged — and contains the largest collection of early medieval Croatian stonework in existence. The 11th-century stone altar screens, with their distinctive interlace patterns, represent a carving tradition that was entirely local and had no parallel elsewhere in Europe at the time.

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