Trnsko – The First 50 Years, a Story of One Generation

The new project of the Zagreb City Museum will present interesting stories of particular quarters of Zagreb, as well as the development of urban housing projects. The first to be presented is the specific quarter of Novi Zagreb – Trnsko.

The exhibition “Trnsko – The First 50 Years, a Story of One Generation” at the Zagreb City Museum marks the realization of a new project “The Zagreb Quarters”. These exhibitions will present the history of the urban development of the city of Zagreb, as well as plentiful and interesting information about each particular quarter. The first exhibition is dedicated to the Trnsko quarter, which visitors will have an opportunity to enjoy until the end of August.

Presentation of Zagreb’s quarters will cover the period from its unification in the mid-19th century until modern times. Trnsko was not chosen randomly but, rather, because it was the first new quarter built south of the Sava River, after which the development of other quarters of Novi Zagreb began.

The exhibition “Trnsko – The First 50 Years, a Story of One Generation” will present the first entirely planned and urbanized quarter of Novi Zagreb. Construction documentation shows the conversion from swamplands into housing estates. However, no quarter consists of only buildings and so the exhibition also offers the specific story of Trnsko – its day to day routines, the mutual bonding of its inhabitants, and the creation of “a neighbourhood spirit”. The story of this community follows the generation that settled in Trnsko in the early 1960s, their life by a construction site and growing up in the neighbourhood until the 1980s, when they mostly moved to other parts of the city or emigrated to other countries.

The exhibition is based on the photographic collection of the Zagreb City Museum, as well as 65 private albums, mostly from early settlers of Novi Zagreb, who have left their memories to the Virtual Museum of Trnsko.

The project of presenting Zagreb’s quarters will continue throughout next year so, after Trnsko, visitors of the Zagreb City Museum will have an opportunity to get to know the stories of other quarters as they were built and developed. These exhibitions will allow museum visitors to learn about the defining moments of each quarter and to understand the cultural and historic influences that shaped each section as well as the community identities of their contemporary inhabitants.