Collection of Postcards and Printed Images

The Collection of Postcards and Printed Images was part of the Collection of Original Photographs until 2011. The number of postcards in the Collection has significantly increased after the opening of the permanent exhibition (in 2000), after which the activities of the Museum were presented to the wider public in more detail and the Museum started receiving increasingly more offers for gifts and purchases, including postcards.

Due to the specific nature of our institution, the motifs (closely or distantly) related to the school system are of most interest to us. The largest number of postcards include motifs of school buildings, teachers and pupils, classes, events, teaching associations and similar. The postcards in the Collection date from the period between the second half of the nineteenth century and the present. The oldest ones are certainly the most remarkable, for instance those from Brinje, Požega, Ogulin, Sušak, Karlovac, Petrinja, Zagreb, Gospić, Marija Bistrica, Đakovo.

About 60% of the existing number of approximately 1,600 postcards show school buildings, either as separate structures or with other nearby objects. The postcard from Brinje, printed in lithography, is considered to be the oldest one. It was sent in 1893 and shows four motifs, one of which is the primary school building.

Postcards showing portraits of teachers, writers or famous people are also important. They are often reproductions of paintings by renowned Croatian artists. A special place is reserved for postcards with the motif of the Croatian Teachers’ Home, the building that houses the Croatian School Museum today.

Authors of old postcards were famous photographers and lithograph makers, who were also the publishers, for instance: Weiss & Dreykurs, Griesbach and Knaus, R. Mosinger Photochrome Institute, I. Reich.

This Collection also contains postcards from the “golden era”, or the beginning of the twentieth century, when millions of postcards travelled around the world and when they were produced in different techniques and with different motifs, displaying cities, artworks and portraits.

Some of the postcards in the Croatian School Museum do not contain any writing, while those that have been filled out often display additional interesting details: either they were written by an eminent, famous person (someone from the teaching or culture-related profession) or they were addressed to such an individual.

Anita Zlomislić
Director of Museum