About the museum:
The Museum of Croatian Archaeological Monuments is one of the oldest museums in Croatia, and the only one founded with the sole task of investigating, collecting, presenting and studying the remains of the material and intellectual culture of the Croats from the Middle Ages, i.e. the period from the 7th to the 15th century, particularly the time of the early medieval Croatian state, from the 9th to the 12th century. It was founded in Knin in 1893, then being called the First Museum of Croatian Monuments, while during World War II, from fears of the dangers of the war, it was moved first to Sinj and then to Klis and then Split, its current seat. Since 1976 it has looked after and exhibited its archaeological heritage in a building made to a design of the architect M. Kauzlarić. The museum material consists almost entirely of various kinds of jewellery, arms, everyday use items, and a large number of stone monuments that once belonged to the interiors of the Early Croatian churches. With its collection of earl medieval interlacing and figural carving and its many Latin Early Croatian epigraphic monuments, the museum is today among the biggest collections of the kind in Europe. Today it has a capacious holding of the Early Croatian archaeological heritage of about 20,000 items, about one quarter of them being exhibited in the permanent display Among other things, perhaps the epigraphic monuments of the 9th to the 12th century on which the names of Croatian kings and princes and of secular and ecclesiastical dignitaries are carved constitute the most important and historically most valuable collection, and this part of the archaeological collection of the museum, which is the oldest “archive” (in stone) in Croatia, has exceptional historical documentary value. As well as its museum activity, the museum today performs extensive archaeological excavations in Early Croatian sites, particularly in its home area in the south of Croatia, in the area between the rivers the Cetina and the Zrmanja, and it is almost much engaged in publishing and exhibiting.
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