Zagreb Art, Architecture & Culture: the back story

About Zagreb Art, Architecture & Culture: the back story

By the ULTIMATE Zagreb Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Zagreb is a city you can walk through in a day and keep discovering for a lifetime. Its hilltop old towns, its 19th-century Lower Town wrapped around a horseshoe of parks and museums, a world-famous school of animated film and a bold contemporary museum across the river make it one of the most rewarding cultural capitals of Central Europe.

The Green Horseshoe

In the second half of the 19th century Zagreb grew fast, and the city planned a new district on the plain below its hills: the Lower Town, Donji Grad, with straight streets, apartment buildings and grand public buildings in the styles of Vienna and Budapest.

Its crown is the Green Horseshoe, remembered as the work of the engineer Milan Lenuci: a U of seven squares and parks running from Zrinjevac to King Tomislav Square and the Botanical Garden, then back past the Croatian National Theatre. Along it stand the Art Pavilion, the Archaeological Museum, the Mimara Museum, the Museum of Arts and Crafts and the theatre itself.

Walk Zagreb’s Green Horseshoe and you pass a museum, a gallery or a theatre almost every few minutes.

The yellow Art Pavilion has the best story. Its iron frame was made for the Croatian pavilion at the Millennium Exhibition in Budapest in 1896, then brought to Zagreb, where the building opened in 1898; today it hosts major exhibitions. Across the Horseshoe, the Croatian National Theatre opened in 1895 to designs by the Viennese architects Fellner and Helmer, with Ivan Meštrović’s Well of Life in front.

Around 1900, Zagreb’s architects embraced the Secession, the Central European Art Nouveau, and the Lower Town is full of its curving façades, mosaics and ironwork. Look up as you walk along Masarykova and Preradovićeva and around Flower Square. In the Ethnographic Museum’s domed Secession building on Mažuranić Square you will find costumes, lace and crafts from every region of Croatia.

The Upper Town

Above the Lower Town rise the two old hill towns, Kaptol and Gradec. In Gradec, the Klovićevi dvori Gallery occupies a former Jesuit monastery and hosts some of the city’s biggest exhibitions, and the Zagreb City Museum, in a former convent, tells the story of the city from its medieval beginnings.

Beneath Gradec runs the Grič Tunnel, dug during the Second World War as an air-raid shelter and restored and opened to the public in 2016. It is now a cool shortcut between Mesnička and Radićeva streets, and sometimes a venue for exhibitions and events.

The Upper Town also keeps two of the city’s most original museums: the Museum of Broken Relationships, which began in 2006 as a travelling exhibition by two Zagreb artists, Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić, and now fills a baroque palace with objects and stories sent from around the world, and the Croatian Museum of Naïve Art.

Meštrović and naïve art

Ivan Meštrović, the great Croatian sculptor of the 20th century, lived and worked in a house in the Upper Town between the wars. The Meštrović Atelier shows his sculptures, drawings and furniture in the rooms where he worked, with bronzes in the courtyard, and his work appears all over the city, from the Well of Life to the round exhibition pavilion that bears his name.

Croatia is famous for its naïve painters, especially the peasant artists of the village of Hlebine, and the Croatian Museum of Naïve Art shows their poetic paintings on glass and canvas. For the wider story of Croatian painting, the Modern Gallery near Zrinjevac holds the national collection of the 19th and 20th centuries, from Vlaho Bukovac to the modernists.

Animation and film

In the 1950s and 1960s, artists at the Zagreb Film studio invented a new way of making cartoons: bold, stylised, witty and adult. Critics called it the Zagreb School of Animated Film, and in 1962 Dušan Vukotić’s Surogat (Ersatz) won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, the first time the award went to a film made outside the United States.

Zagreb founded Animafest in 1972, one of the oldest festivals of animated film in the world. Watch classic and new films at Kino Tuškanac and the Kinoteka, the city’s arthouse screens.

Across the Sava: contemporary Zagreb

In 2009 the Museum of Contemporary Art moved into a new building by the architect Igor Franić on Avenija Dubrovnik in Novi Zagreb, the modernist city that grew across the Sava after the Second World War. Its meander-shaped building holds Croatian and international art from the 1950s to today and is busy with exhibitions, films and events.

West of the centre, Lauba shows a large private collection of Croatian contemporary art in a striking former industrial hall, with changing displays and events. For the stage, the Zagreb Youth Theatre, ZKM, is known across the region for bold contemporary theatre, and the Gavella Drama Theatre and the Komedija, home of musicals and operetta, complete the picture, with the Lisinski Concert Hall, home of the Zagreb Philharmonic, for music.

Cultural calendar

Animafest Zagreb, the World Festival of Animated Film, held its 36th edition from 8 to 13 June 2026. The 24th Zagreb Film Festival runs from 9 to 15 November 2026 at the Kaptol Boutique Cinema, the Kinoteka, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Surogatkino KIC, opening with a restored print of the Croatian classic Rondo for its 60th anniversary.

In December the parks of the Lower Town host the city’s Advent celebrations. Always check the festival’s own website before you travel: programmes and dates are announced there first.

What’s new

Zagreb Film Festival (checked October 2026): the programme for the 24th edition, 9 to 15 November 2026, was presented in October, with screenings in cinemas and online.

Museum of Contemporary Art (checked October 2026): the museum is one of the four venues of the 2026 Zagreb Film Festival; see its website for current exhibitions.

Our advice: walk the Horseshoe in a loop, stopping at one museum, ride the funicular to the Upper Town for Meštrović and the Broken Relationships, and keep one evening for the National Theatre and one afternoon for Novi Zagreb.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Zagreb Art, Architecture & Culture: the back story before you go.