Housed in the former Convent of the Clarissan Sisters at the top of Opatička Street, the City Museum walks you through eight centuries of Zagreb history in chronological galleries — from the foundation of Gradec and Kaptol in the 13th century, through the long Habsburg centuries, the slow growth of the Lower Town, the 20th-century traumas of two world wars and the Homeland War of 1991, and into the present.
The exhibits mix the personal and the political: a 19th-century shop window reconstructed in full, signs and uniforms from the communist period, a section on the 2020 earthquake. Captions are bilingual, in Croatian and English. The cloister of the original convent is preserved at the heart of the building.