About the museum:
The Stjepan Gruber Local History Museum was founded in 1953 and has been working under its present title since 1993. It is housed in two historical buildings, the Čardak and the Agency, and since 2003 also in a new structure in which there are offices and storage space. The museum building is right alongside the bank of the Sava River in the western part of Županja. The space between the Čardak and the Agency is taken by the museum’s grounds. The Županja Borderers’ Čardak – a raised watchtower – is the only so preserved specimen of the architecture of the Military Frontier on the long border on the Sava, the one-time frontier between the empires of Austro-Hungary and the Ottomans. It was built at the beginning of the 19th century, when it was the central point of the border guards, that is, a watchtower on the Turkish border. The Agency building, in which lies the ethnographic collection, was built in the mid-19th century, when there was a constant steamship line, the ship Sloga, the first ever Croatian steamship, plying the river between Sisak and Zemun. Since Županja was an important dock between Zemun and Sisak, this building that served as a warehouse for the steamship agency must have been built at that time. Hence the name of it today. The permanent display of the collections of archaeology, history, cultural history has been on show since 2007. The material is exhibited in chronological order, palaeontological specimens being placed in the entrance and reception space, followed by archaeological material from the area of the Županja part of the Sava valley (Posavina) from prehistory, via Antiquity to the High and Late Middle Ages. In the upstairs room comes a display of historical and culture history material. The permanent display of the historical periods shows the materials of the museum in several chronological units. In the first two rooms there is material from the Turkish and Military Frontier period, while in the third room there is a reproduction of an apothecary’s from Babina Greda (second half of the 19th century). Artworks from the 18th and 19th centuries are worked into other historical material, that is, into the setting of the residential ambience of the age of Revivalist styles in the fourth room, and a middle-class salon of the 1930s is shown in the last room. In these last two rooms there are various objects that tell of the cutting edge of technology of the age (Hanaman bulbs, typewriters, cameras and so on). Several multimedia files of the more recent history of the region can be seen as part of the permanent display upstairs. Photographs and documents from World Wars I and II are shown, as well as post-war development in Županja, with a review of the most important economic and social changes. The last part of the display consists of documentary films relating to the Homeland War. In the premises of the museum, in the museum’s grounds, in the ethno-park and the Dretvić apartment and in other appropriate premises in the city and surrounds, the museum puts on exhibitions, events, workshops, specialised lectures and media presentations.
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