About the museum:
The Croatian Sports Museum is an institution that systematically collects, studies and preserves material related to physical exercise and sport. As well as this, its basic activity, the museum puts on exhibitions, organises lectures and conferences, issues publications, collaborates in the production of films, provides information, works on the preparation of the permanent display, works with cognate institutions and provides users with the opportunity to research the museum material. The beginnings of the museum and exhibition activity relating to sports in Croatia consist of the exhibitions put on by Franjo Bučar at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. When the Physical Culture College was founded in Zagreb in 1959, the idea arose for the foundation of a museum. Some of the material was assembled in the Physical Education Institute, which started work in 1952. The problem of the museum was discussed in early 1961 by the coordinating commission of the Croatian Sports Federation and Partisan Croatia, which confided the task of founding a museum of physical culture in Croatia under the aegis of the Physical Culture College to the Propaganda Commission. Ivo Kaleb was at the head of this commission. In 1965 the propaganda commission of the physical culture organisations federation of Croatia founded an initiative committee for the foundation of the museum, the president of it being Živko Radan, with members Vladimir Blašković, Stjepan Cerjan, Mladen Delić, Ivan Hrestak, Hrvoje Macanović, Milivoj Radović and Ivica Sudnik. In 1966 the initiative committee turned into the history of physical culture commission of the federation, and was led until his death in 1989 by Živko Radan. The first big action of the commission was the organisation of an exhibition to mark the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Franjo Bučar; this was held in the premises of the Tourist Board in Zagreb in the Upper Town. The museum worked as a department of the physical culture faculty until 1977, when in the building of the faculty, in premises of 100 square metres, the permanent display of the museum was opened. In 1979 the Museums Council of Croatia put the Museum of Physical Culture on the official list of Croatian museum establishments. A decision of the council of the said faculty established the museum as an independent organisation unit of the Physical Culture Faculty. The premises that the permanent display had occupied were turned in 1987 into a classroom, and in 1988 the museum moved to premises in Ilica 7, and in 1998 into premises in Ilica 13, where it still is today. In 1990 the museum changed its name to the Croatian Sports Museum and was registered as a museum institution on October 23, 2003.
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