Step in and out of history
ZAGREB, Croatia — My rental car and I met in Zagreb in Croatia’s northeast, a capital city whose surrounding countryside is home to more than 90 castles, many of them ruins accessible from a web of hiking trails.
On Sunday morning the aromas of coffee and warm pastry drifted through the streets, which are lined with sidewalk cafes bustling with Zagrebcani — locals — and students of this university town.
Sleek blue streetcars glided past grand manors, Baroque palaces and heritage buildings. Centuries of Habsburg Empire rule left angels in the architecture and churches with onion-shaped towers across this metropolis founded by the Romans in the 1st century.
The old city is divided into Lower Town and Upper Town. Lower Town is the 19th century theater, restaurant and boutique district where shops sell stylish, locally designed and crafted clothes, shoes and bags.
The grandest place to shop is the Oktogon, built in 1900, covered passageways with ornately tiled floors beneath an octagon-shaped, domed stained-glass ceiling. Nearby, at the lively, daily Dolac market, farmers, flower sellers and artisans hawked their goods s on a cobblestone square.
I ducked into the retro-chic Palace Hotel’s charmingly Viennese-style restaurant for the city’s signature dish of strukli, mouth-watering Croatian dumplings filled with sweet ricotta cheese. They appear on menus nearly every- where, boiled and ladled into rich soups or stuffed with puréed seasonal vegetables such as pumpkin, bathed in cream, then baked until slightly browned.
Zagreb is adorned with sculptures, many by Croatian master Ivan Mestrovic, including several of local hero Nikola Tesla, after whom the electric car is named.
Sculptures are seemingly everywhere, from central Marshal Tito Square, honoring the former Communist president, to the series of parks and open spaces that form a relaxing green horseshoe around Old Town.
Though a funicular chugs up the cliff-side to the medieval Upper Town, I preferred wandering through a hilly labyrinth of stone and wooden stairways, past a jumble of fortress towers and tile-roofed residences where window boxes burst with red geraniums.
I eventually reached a maze of cobblestone streets and squares lighted by gas lamps and passed the presidential palace and parliament, the iconic 13th century St. Mark’s Church, with the city’s coat of arms displayed in colorful roof tiles, and the Zagreb Cathedral.
Zagreb has museums and galleries galore, but my quest was the Museum of Broken Relationships, a clever contemporary tribute to love gone wrong with an entertaining collection of stories and artifacts, including the “ex-ax” donated by a Berlin woman who used it to chop up her former lover’s furniture. In 2011 the quirky collection won an award as Europe’s most innovative museum.