Zagreb: history and heritage

About Zagreb: history and heritage

By the ULTIMATE Zagreb Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Zagreb was born twice. On one hill stood Kaptol, the bishop’s town around the cathedral; on the next stood Gradec, a royal free town of merchants and craftsmen. For centuries the two quarrelled across the stream that ran between them, now Tkalčićeva Street. They became one city only in 1850, and the Habsburg Lower Town that grew below them gave Zagreb the elegant, green, unhurried look of a Central European capital.

At a glance

Names through history: Kaptol and Gradec, united in 1850; Agram in German; Zágráb in Hungarian.

Peoples: South Slavic Croats, with German-speaking, Hungarian, Jewish and Serbian communities over the centuries.

Two hills, two towns and one stream between them: Zagreb’s story starts with a quarrel.

Shaped by: the medieval Hungarian-Croatian kingdom, the Habsburgs (1527–1918), Yugoslavia and, since 1991, independent Croatia.

Geography: the foothills of Medvednica above the River Sava, on the road between Central Europe and the Adriatic.

Zagreb today

The City of Zagreb counted 767,131 people in the 2021 census, according to the Croatian Bureau of Statistics: around a fifth of the country’s population. Most are Croats, and the city also has Serbian, Bosniak, Albanian, Roma and Slovenian communities, as well as a growing number of newcomers from across the world.

Kaptol and Gradec

King Ladislaus of Hungary founded the Diocese of Zagreb in 1094, and the bishop’s settlement of Kaptol grew around the cathedral. After the Tatar invasion of 1242, King Béla IV granted the neighbouring hill, Gradec, a Golden Bull that made it a royal free town. Gradec’s walls, the Lotrščak Tower and the Stone Gate, with its shrine to the Virgin that survived a fire in 1731, still define the Upper Town. In 1850 Kaptol, Gradec and the surrounding settlements were united as one city.

The Habsburg centuries

In 1527 the Croatian nobility chose the Habsburgs as their kings, and for almost four centuries Zagreb looked to Vienna and Budapest. In the 1830s and 1840s it was the centre of the Illyrian movement, which championed the Croatian language and culture, and in 1918 Croatia left Austria-Hungary for the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Since 1991 Zagreb has been the capital of an independent Croatia.

The earthquake of 1880

On 9 November 1880 an earthquake badly damaged the city. The architect Hermann Bollé rebuilt the cathedral in neo-Gothic style, with the twin spires that now dominate the skyline, and went on to design the arcades of Mirogoj Cemetery, opened in 1876 and one of the finest park cemeteries in Europe. The quake also cleared the way for a building boom in the Lower Town.

The Green Horseshoe

The city engineer Milan Lenuci planned a U-shaped chain of squares and parks, the Lenuci or Green Horseshoe, lined with the institutions of a modern capital: the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (founded in 1866), the Art Pavilion, the Botanical Garden, the Mimara Museum and the Croatian National Theatre, designed by the Viennese firm Fellner & Helmer and opened in 1895. Walk it on a spring morning and you see why Zagreb is so often compared with Vienna.

Peoples, crafts and customs

The University of Zagreb traces its roots to a Jesuit academy chartered in 1669, making it one of the oldest in this part of Europe. Croatia’s traditions are alive in the city: the red licitar gingerbread hearts, recognised by UNESCO as intangible heritage in 2010, the red umbrellas of Šestine, and the cravat, which takes its name from the scarves of Croatian soldiers in seventeenth-century France. Naive painting from the village of Hlebine hangs in the Croatian Museum of Naïve Art, and the sculptor Ivan Meštrović’s former home on the Upper Town is now his atelier museum.

Our advice: ride the funicular to the Upper Town, see St Mark’s roof and the Stone Gate, then walk down through Kaptol to Dolac Market and on along the Green Horseshoe. Stop for coffee on Zrinjevac: in Zagreb, the café is part of the heritage.

Sources

Population: Croatian Bureau of Statistics, 2021 Census of Population, Households and Dwellings. History: Zagreb Tourist Board; Zagreb City Museum; UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Zagreb”.

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