While touring the city with one of the teams participating in European Universities Games Zagreb-Rijeka 2016, we stopped by one of the most visited museums in Zagreb, the Museum of Broken Relationships.
We encountered there a lot of European Universities Games participants who were thrilled with the Museum.
‘Currently, I’m reading the stories connected to the Museum’s exhibits and I find them interesting. I have never seen something like this before,’ said Donatas Grazulis, the coach of the Lithuanian men’s futsal team.
The Museum was created from the broken relationship of two artists: Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić. They decided to open a museum because they didn’t know what to do with some of their things after they broke up. At first, it was a travelling exhibition that collected things people wanted to get rid of after their broken relationships, but in a creative way – by donating to the exhibition. The Museum was created four years later at its current location in Zagreb’s Upper Town.
Over a thousand people send their things with specific messages throughout the year, and more than 100 000 visited it since it was founded. We saw for ourselves that the Museum is always full of visitors.
All of the exhibits can be seen as a universal form on how to get over a broken relationship, even though the exhibits are often of an intimate nature, and connected to the local culture. But it doesn’t have to be a romantic relationship. There is an entire room of exhibits dedicated to relationships between children and their parents, and currently there are a lot exhibits connected with immigrants. It is interesting that recently a Museum of Broken Relationships was opened in Los Angeles which was modelled after Zagreb’s Museum of Broken Relationships.
All of the athletes we talked to agree on one thing – they were thrilled with the Museum, but they will leave Zagreb with happy memories and a lot of newly-formed relationships.
