Collections

Museum advisor: Branka Vojnović Traživuk, Ph. D

E-mail: branka@etnografski-muzej-split.hr 

The art collection contains paintings, graphics, and sculptures by various authors, as well as postcards that mainly belong to the first half of the 20th century with motifs from peasant life. The most common are depictions of male and female figures dressed in traditional costumes, which were used at the beginning of the Museum's work when researching traditional clothing. In recent times, their independent cultural and historical value has been emphasized, and the heritage potential of naive artistic expression has been noticed.

Museum advisor: Sanja Ivančić
E-mail: sanja@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

The majority of items in the lace collection of the Ethnographic Museum Split were collected before the Second World War. Back then, it was still possible to get the most beautiful examples of this type of fine domestic textile handicrafts. What distinguishes them from later and contemporary production is that they were made and applied as decoration on cotton or linen parts of women's clothing, shirts, scarves, or caps in the needle-stitched lace technique typical of coastal Dalmatia. The collection also contains a smaller number of unique sacred objects made with the same technique of sewn lace or bobbin lace, a production technique that we emphasize today only as a tradition in northwestern Croatia. With the advent of industrial lace, handmade lace also developed in the direction of entirely independent objects. Such lace can be applied in different ways by inserting or using up to a picture on the wall as a graphic, artistic value. With examples from the 21st century, this collection also testifies to the more recent phenomena of lace-making and application.

Museum advisor: Silvio Braica, Ph. D.

E-mail: silvio@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

The collection consists of individual and diverse objects gathered from Europe, the world, and all continents. The objects in the collection are very different in type, material, and significance - this reflects the Museum's lack of interest in colonial themes.

Museum advisor: Branka Vojnović Traživuk, Ph. D.

E-mail: branka@etnografski-muzej-split.hr 

The collection of musical instruments is a relatively small but valuable collection of chordophones, aerophones, and traditional idiophonic handmade instruments in wood and other natural materials. The most numerous are various pipes and fiddles from the Dalmatian hinterland. The collection presents typical musical instruments of southern Croatia, some of which are today an integral part of the rich folklore but in unique forms and decorations that belong to the past.

Museum advisor: Sanja Ivančić

E-mail: sanja@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

The collection includes and follows the way of making or acquiring clothing, their types and styles arranged in different compositions of women's, men's, or children's clothing of the narrow land part of coastal Dalmatia and its islands. In contrast to Dalmatia's interior, this area's objects and this collection record a vast range of execution lines and versions: from those objects from the beginning to the result made in the domestic environment to those acquired as a semi-finished or finished product bought in the shops of local markets. With these latter objects, the local identity was recognized, established, and adopted only in the middle of the 20th century, when this collection also recorded a faster growth.

Museum advisor: Branka Vojnović Traživuk, Ph. D.

E-mail: branka@etnografski-muzej-split.hr 

The collection of household inventory is a complex whole that consists of various items that made up the equipment of folk and rural houses in the past. It includes large items such as furniture, a complete bedroom from the beginning of the 20th century, and small household items like numerous kitchen utensils. It is completed by finer shopping ceramics and countless decorative items. The collection also includes treasure chests that were used to store clothes and other valuables before the appearance of wardrobes.

Museum advisor: Silvio Braica, Ph. D.

E-mail: silvio@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

The collection consists of old Museum accessories and valuable pieces of old furniture, machines, and inscriptions used in the Museum during its foundation, the first years of activity, and all those items that are no longer used due to technological obsolescence.

Senior curator: Maja Alujević

E-mail: maja@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

The collection of costumes of central Croatia presents festive versions of costumes from central Croatia, where local cloth made from the plants like flax and hemp was widely used in the production of folk costumes. In addition to the sets of costumes, the collection also includes different types of women's headdresses, which show great diversity within the traditional costumes of this area.

Museum advisor: Ida Jakšić

E-mail: ida@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

The collection of costumes from the Dalmatian hinterland is one of the most extensive collections within the holdings of the Ethnographic Museum Split. It represents a valuable testimony to the traditional way of dressing in the continental part of Dalmatia. The primary use of sheep's wool in the domestic manufacture of textile items is understandable, considering sheep farming, which used to be the primary economic branch of this rugged area.

Senior curator: Ivana Vuković 

E-mail: ivana@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

The collection of textiles from Bosnia and Herzegovina contains valuable examples of folk textile handicrafts related to the clothing culture of the inhabitants of the neighboring country.

The most significant part of the collection's items refers to the traditional clothing of the population of the Dinaric ethnographic zone of Bosnia and Herzegovina, along with individual clothing examples of central Bosnian and Posavina costumes.

A prominent part of the collection consists of women's hats and scarves. The headpieces by type belong to Late Gothic headdresses, and their symmetrically shaped embroidery is performed above the forehead. In addition to geometrically shaped decorations, we often find plant motifs on these caps, among which pomegranates stand out.

In addition to clothing, in the collection, we also find items characteristic of the culture of residence, such as decorative or ablution mahrams that served as decorative or useful items in a traditional home.

Senior Curator: Maja Alujević

E-mail: maja@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

The collection of costumes from the Republic of Kosovo and the Republic of North Macedonia was created at the very beginning of the Museum's activities and is unique because it contains authentic and rare examples of clothing from the time of traditional culture in the second half of the 19th the first decades of the 20th century. Lavish clothing of bourgeois provenance and distinctive oriental style stand out in particular, and some can only be found in Kosovo and North Macedonia Museums.

Senior curator: Maja Alujević

E-mail: maja@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

The collection of Slavonia and Baranja costumes combines traditional ceremonial clothing made and used in the area of Slavonia and Baranja, which belongs to the period from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. The most numerous types of objects in the collection are caps and scarves as parts of women's traditional headdresses. The Museum material in this collection represents many embroidery techniques, and gold embroidery stands out today as a symbol of Slavonia's identity.

Museum advisor: Silvio Braica, Ph.D.

E-mail: silvio@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

The collection consists of objects that symbolize certain (annual) customs, for example, Christmas, Easter, Carnival, etc. The objects collected from the localities are mainly from Dalmatia, although some are also from northern Croatia. Many objects are made of natural materials (palm trees, branches) prone to deterioration

Museum Advisor: Silvio Braica, Ph. D.

E-mail: silvio@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

The items in the collection are divided into cold weapons (mostly yatagans, knives, and daggers), firearms (mostly holsters and rifles), and accessories (various powder flasks and accessories). The weapons in the care of the Ethnographic Museum Split are mostly of oriental origin, and the metals and materials that make the difference are silver, brass, bone, or horn.

Museum advisor: Sanja Ivančić

E-ail: sanja@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

The material of this collection consists of textile items from household inventory that were used to furnish rural or civil houses on the Dalmatian coast and the islands, but also in civil areas deep in the Dalmatian hinterland. This collection of bedspreads, tablecloths, bedding, and other related items represents typical examples of women's handiwork, techniques, and decoration motifs preserved until the middle of the 20th century.

Senior curator: Ivana Vuković

E-mail: ivana@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

The collection of reconstructed costumes was created in 2001 to record the contemporary use and interpretation of heritage clothing elements. Therefore, the items kept in it are of recent origin and refer to the period from the end of the 19th century onwards.

In addition to a smaller number of clothing items, the collection contains clothing sets mainly from the Dalmatia area, its coastal and island parts, and the hinterland.

In addition to faithful replicas of costumes, this collection also preserves studious reconstructions of clothing sets made based on art and other written sources.

Museum advisor: Sanja Ivančić

E-mail: sanja@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

The objects of this collection will be easily recognized and determined by the layman as folk jewelry, much earlier than those from the gold jewelry collection. These large and heavy metal objects, with their types and stylistic features, adhere to the typological types and customary norms of folk costumes, above all, those from the Dalmatian hinterland. It is characterized by the abundant use of silver, copper, tin, and other alloys, and metal ornamentation is often refreshed with colorful inserts made of glass beads, mother-of-pearl, pastes, or semi-precious stones (carnelian). Gold was used only for gilding objects. In rural areas, jewelry is created and shaped using different, more straightforward stringing techniques, such as sewing money onto textiles, a common practice in the Dinaric ethnographic area. The collection also contains jewelry from Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of North Macedonia.

Museum advisor: Silvio Braica, Ph. D.

E-mail: silvio@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

The rug collection comprises 50 preserved historical oriental origin and manufactured woolen rugs, mostly made at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. They were acquired at the beginning of the 20th century. Of the various types of rugs and decorations, we should mention Bukhara, Shirvan, Farahan, Hamadan, and several prayer rugs. Rugs originate mainly from Turkey, Persia, Turkestan, and the Caucasus. The Museum also preserves crochet rugs from Croatia.

Senior curator: Ivana Vuković

E-mail: ivana@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

The collection of the traditional farming and agriculture of the Split Ethnographic Museum gathers items that primarily record the non-industrial forms of farming and agriculture of the population of Dalmatia from the second half of the 19th century onwards.

Thus, in the collection, we find items and tools that the local population made and used during cultivation, olive and oil growing, viticulture and winemaking, animal husbandry, beekeeping, and fishing, as well as items used in transport during the performance of these traditional everyday farming and agricultural activities.

Museum advisor: Branka Vojnović Traživuk, Ph. D

E-mail: branka@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

The collection of traditional handicrafts includes a variety of objects and tools used to process various natural materials. Most of them were used in the production and processing of textiles. For example, the distaffs were used to pull out the wool thread. The collection includes domestic ceramics shaped on the potter's wheel, pipes and accessories for making them, and wattle objects. Various objects are also made of wood and decorated with geometrical-plant ornaments and animal and human motifs. The collection thus presents the traditional skills of making and decorating objects of daily use typical of the past of the Croatian countryside.

Museum advisor: Sanja Ivančić

E-mail: sanja@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

Gold jewelry is a typological feature of coastal Dalmatia, and examples from its hinterland are rarer. The types of objects from the collection are easily recognized as jewelry with the same global value even today. These are independent items made by master goldsmiths and bought and worn as a finished product. In the 19th century in Split and its surroundings, the cities of Trogir and Kaštela, they developed and shaped these objects with gold thread in the filigree technique, decorated with multi-layered, densely strung tiny pearls and gold granules, less often precious or semi-precious stones.

As a rule, these are women's large objects quickly passed down and inherited from generation to generation of younger women, so even today, many examples are preserved in Dalmatian families. The most numerous types are earrings, various pendants and necklaces, brooches, and rings, which still play an essential role in wedding customs. Of course, the most impressive are objects that have passed the time, such as flickering hair pins or breast pins, which are difficult to apply in the contemporary culture of dressing and decorating.

Museum advisor: Ida Jakšić

E-mail: ida@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

The collection of embroidery samples includes examples of traditional textile handicrafts, namely, embroidery works on canvas. Most of them are embroidered parts of clothing, which come mainly from the mountainous areas of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina and, to a lesser extent, from central and north-eastern Croatia and Montenegro.

Senior librarian: Iva Meštrović

E-mail: iva@etnografski-muzej-split.hr

Until recently, some of this material was processed within the EMS Professional Archive holdings. Its distribution creates new, independent documentation holdings (Hemeroteca, Documentation on the foundation and history of the Museum, Evidence of field research, Professional and scientific work, etc.) maintained in the S++ database. In the same database, the following holdings are processed: Photo Library, Book of negatives, Pedagogical activity, Publishing activity, and Conservation and restoration procedures. The Museum is systematically digitizing this material. The material is provided for use by our experts and external users upon request.