About the museum:
Orebić Maritime Museum, founded in 1957, possesses diverse material that registers the history and development of this activity that is so important in the context of the town. In the archaeological department there are ancient, mainly Roman, pagan, and Early Christian items from everyday life and fragments of artistic working. Linking on from them in the chronological order of the cultures that vigorously built and gave shape here to an increasingly valuable centre of human life are fine fragments from pre-Romanesque church furnishing from the time of the conversion of the Croats. Display cases show fragments of glass and walls paintings, bronze items, clasps, Byzantine and medieval coins and other small items used in churches, in the household or in fishing founding in the ruins on the island of Majsan, from prehistory to the 11th century. They belonged to a pagan villa, and to an early medieval monastery and church. The museum displays paintings of Pelješac sailing ships at sea and in battles with the pirates from the 17th to the end of the 19th century, ship’s tools, weapons, atlases, nautical and school books, health and travel documents, the surgeon’s gallery, decorations and pictures of sailors, documents, rules, lists of members, shares and regulations of the insurance of sailors of the Pelješac Shipping Company. Ships’ accessories are shown: figureheads, balls made out of rope for sailors’ games, the carpentering tools of the shipbuilders of the short-lasting social shipyard set up in Orebić in 1875, from which even now the neo-Baroque pillars can be seen, with the gate along the road of the area still called Škvar (Shipyard). The activity of the Pelješac Shipping Company is shown, which lasted from 1855 to 1891 and declined when the superior steamships appeared.
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