Culture and history - Celebrating heritage richness

Cultural and historical department

The Cultural and Historical Department contains various items arranged in a dozen collections which testify to the cultural, social and economic life of the Town of Bjelovar and its surroundings from the town's founding. The most important collection within the department is the Sacral Collection, which houses two altars from the old chapel in the village of Gornje Zdjelice near Bjelovar, dated back to the XVIII. century. There are individual sculptures, altarpieces, candlesticks and other items of the church inventory, as well as extremely important testimonies from a wider area of Bjelovar during the breakthrough of the Baroque style in a period of stagnation and weak artistic production due to the constant incursions of the Turks.

It should be noted that within the collection there are also sacred objects of the Judaic religion (tasos, jad, decalogs) that belonged to the Jewish municipality which played an important economic and social role in the town until the Second World War. The collection of old and rare books preserves the book collection from the Nova Rača parish library among which lies a leather-covered wooden book from the end of the 16th century, adorned with ornaments and illustrations of the four evangelists.

Collections of furniture and art objects made from glass, porcelain and metals are evidence of the high civic culture brought to the town primarily by the militaristic German population, traced from the very foundation of the city. The oldest item dates before the town's foundation, a cabinet from the 18th century, followed by wardrobes, secretaries, clocks and seating furniture representative of their time periods, on the basis of which we can follow stylistical and typological development of furniture from classicism to art nouveau.

Within the collection there are inventories from the town's many institutions; pharmacies “K crnom orlu” and “K angjelu,” the First Croatian Savings Bank, the old Partizan cinema and items used in the Bjelovar Theater in the 1950s.

Glass objects such as Rococo glasses from the 18th century, Biedermeier glass coated in green tint due to uranium in its composition, as well as a glass flytrap have been preserved, objects of high artistic craft and museological value. There are also all those items of daily use (cutlery, services, clothes, fashion accessories, packaging, perfumes) that illustrate not only the stylistic and morphological development of the objects, but also the style and standard of living of the town's population from its founding to the present day.