Good thing for a local Zagreb guide like me is the fact that visitors of Zagreb can't really find any decent literature about the city. That's precisely one of the reasons why I started this blog - to share some lesser known information about my hometown with its guests. You will hardly find any literature in English, or any other language but Croatian, except for some pocket guides or tourist brochures. Even the city museums are unlikely to offer translations of their editions. There's still a chance you'll stumble upon something interesting and inexpensive. For example, last month I purchased a wonderful lowprice catalogue from last year's exhibition Memories of Zagreb at the Zagreb City Museum.
On the other hand, residents are lucky enough to have piles of literature about Zagreb at their disposal, although many of them aren't even aware of its existance. The city libraries own a large collection of books about Zagreb called Zagrabiensia. They also started a project of digitalizing sensible archives about Zagreb. Speaking about publishing old prints on the web, there's this wonderful project of historic newspapers and old journals digitalization. I have such a warm feeling when I think of old books which is why I've never ceased to like Il Nome della Rosa - it's a cliche, I know:)
Even though I like going through old books, what I like much more is revelation and availability of information that has come our way in the past decades, going as far as to revive forgotten archives! Let's hope the internet censorship legislation doesn't put the information-flow back to the old library drawers.
2 comments:
Wow, these resources are great! Thank you for sharing! I wish I had known about the digital archive of historic newspapers when I was writing my thesis on Ivan Meštrović. I had tried to find something like that, and didn't have any luck.
And the lack of information about Zagreb is partially why I started blogging, too. It's such a great city!
Your blog posts are really impressive, Elaine
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