Museum of Broken Relationships
The Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia, is a permanent museum dedicated to the universal human experience of lost love and ended partnerships. Founded in 2006 by artists Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić — themselves formerly in a relationship — it grew from a traveling global exhibition into a fixed institution in Zagreb’s Upper Town, where it has become one of the city’s most visited cultural attractions.
At a glance
- Type
- Contemporary museum of personal objects and human emotional experience
- Period
- Travelling exhibition launched 2006; permanent Zagreb museum opened 2010
- Style
- Housed in the 18th-century Baroque Kulmer Palace in Zagreb’s Upper Town
- Location
- Ćirilometodska 2, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia
- Coordinates
- 45.8150° N, 15.9713° E
Overview
The Museum of Broken Relationships presents a collection of donated objects — each accompanied by the anonymous personal story of the relationship it represents — as a communal archive of emotional experience. The collection spans continents and cultures, with items submitted by donors worldwide, and reflects the museum’s understanding that loss and the end of love are universal human events worthy of serious cultural attention. The museum has won international recognition including the Council of Europe Museum Prize (2011).
History
Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić conceived the project in 2003 as a way to process their own separation, asking friends to contribute objects from their ended relationships. The first travelling exhibition launched in 2006 and toured cities across Europe, North America, and beyond before the permanent Zagreb institution opened in 2010 in the Kulmer Palace. A sister location subsequently opened in Los Angeles, extending the project’s reach into the United States.
What you see
Each exhibit consists of an ordinary or extraordinary object — a toaster, a prosthetic leg, a garden gnome, an axe — paired with a brief text narrating the relationship it comes from and the circumstances of its end. The anonymous, first-person format gives the collection an intimacy and emotional directness unusual in museum settings. Temporary exhibitions and a global donation programme continuously refresh the holdings. The Kulmer Palace setting, with its vaulted stone rooms, provides an atmospheric counterpoint to the contemporary subject matter.
Cultural significance
The Museum of Broken Relationships has contributed a genuinely new model to contemporary museology: the personal-object museum as collective emotional testimony. By treating romantic loss as a subject worthy of institutional preservation, it challenges conventional hierarchies of what museums collect and what stories they tell. The museum’s international travelling exhibition has brought this model to audiences across six continents, influencing a generation of participatory museum projects.
Practical information
- Address
- Ćirilometodska 2, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia
- Hours
- Daily 09:00–22:30 (summer); daily 09:00–21:00 (winter). Check official website for current schedule.
- Admission
- Check official website for current ticket prices.
- Website
- brokenships.com
Getting there
The museum is in Zagreb’s Upper Town (Gornji Grad), accessible on foot via the historic funicular (Uspinjača) from Ilica Street in the Lower Town — a 1-minute ride and one of Zagreb’s landmarks in itself. Alternatively, walk up the steps from Radićeva Street. Tram stops in the Lower Town include Trg bana Jelačića (central square), a 5-minute walk from the funicular. The museum is within the same pedestrian zone as St Mark’s Church and the Croatian Parliament.