A Project to Revive Old Zagorje Crafts

As of recently, the Kumrovec museum Staro Selo /Old Village/ has become the Center for Traditional Crafts in Croatia. Its opening coincides with the launch of the project – Old Crafts – New Attractions for Culture Tourism of Croatian Zagorje.

The objectives and tasks of the newly opened Center for Traditional Crafts will be to map the territory of Croatian Zagorje with a view to finding masters and connoisseurs of different traditional crafts, skills and customs. This will serve to create a database of traditional crafts which should be offered as new contents of the new cultural tourism offer in the cross boundary area of Croatia and Slovenia.
The opening of the center in the largest Croatian outdoor museum, the Kumrovec Museum Staro Selo, which has taken place in this festive period, coincides with the launch of the project Old Crafts – New Attractions of Culture Tourism. 

This is a project co-financed by the European Union within the framework of the INTERREG III, a project aimed at reviving traditional resources for the purposes of the culture tourism in Croatia, Slovenia and Hungary.

Numerous traditional crafts, arts and skills of Croatia, as well as traditional songs, have been slowly headed for oblivion. In order to prevent that from happening, the citizens of Kumrovec rallied around the Museum of Croatian Zagorje in Gornja Stubica and the Kumrovec Old Village Museum, the two institutions in charge of the revival project, and have decided to take any measure necessary to use the traditional resources as a new cultural attraction of the area. In order to achieve the set goals, the Staro Selo Museum has already organized a number of workshops for making traditional Zagorje handicraft and Christmas decorations.

The Staro Selo Museum covers an area of 12,500 square meters, and features a total of 25 residential, 9 commercial and eight auxiliary buildings (two corn barns, two pig sties and four water wells). All the buildings have been restored. The Museum holding has approximately 2,800 exhibits, most of which form part of the permanent exhibits. The 15 permanent ethnographic and two historical displays show a traditional way of life, customs and handicraft, old or forgotten arts and crafts, historical figures and events linked to Kumrovec and the former area of the Klanjec district. Several local families residing in the reconstructed old nucleus of Kumrovec village give a dynamic character to what would otherwise be a rather static and lifeless display of a rural way of life. 

All the buildings have been reconstructed and renovated “in situ” which means that practically no house, water well, pig sty or corn barn have been brought from elsewhere but rather reconstructed on their original foundations, i.e. in the same places where they stood at the turn of the 19th century.