Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts

A palace of learning on Zrinjevac, the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts occupies a stately Neo-Renaissance building at the head of the leafy Zrinjevac square in Zagreb's lower town. Founded in 1866 on the initiative of Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer, it is the oldest and most prestigious scholarly institution in the country and a driving force in nineteenth-century Croatian national culture.

The building itself is a landmark of the Green Horseshoe, its red-brick and stone facade rising in dignified arcades above the plane trees. Strossmayer, a great patron of the arts, endowed the academy with his personal collection of Old Master paintings, and the upper floor houses the Strossmayer Gallery of Old Masters, a museum of European painting from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries with works by Italian, Flemish and Dutch artists.

In the entrance hall sits a treasure of another kind, the Baška tablet, one of the oldest surviving monuments of the Croatian language, carved in Glagolitic script around 1100. This makes the building a pilgrimage point for anyone interested in the roots of Croatian literacy, quite apart from its art collection.

For visitors the academy offers a quiet cultural stop away from the busier upper-town sights. The picture gallery keeps museum hours and charges a modest admission, while the ground-floor lobby with the Baška tablet can usually be seen freely. The surrounding Zrinjevac square, with its music pavilion, fountains and meteorological column, is one of the most elegant urban spaces in the city and a fine place to rest. The academy sits within a short walk of the Art Pavilion, the railway station and the archaeological museum, forming part of a dense cluster of lower-town institutions.