Explore Zagreb
A broad, flagstoned expanse flanked by cafés and hectic with the whizz of trams and hurrying pedestrians, Trg bana Jelačića (Governor Jelačić Square) is as good a place as any to start exploring the city, and is within easy walking distance of more or less everything you’ll want to see. It’s also the biggest tram stop in Zagreb, standing at the intersection of seven cross-town routes, and the place where half the city seems to meet in the evening – either beneath the ugly clock mounted on metal stilts on the western side of the square, or right on the corner of the square and Gajeva (a corner colloquially known as “Krleža” after the bookshop that once stood here).
At the square’s centre is the attention-hogging equestrian statue of the nineteenth-century Ban of Croatia, Josip Jelačić, completed in 1866 by the Viennese sculptor Fernkorn just as the Habsburg authorities were beginning to erode the semi-autonomy which Jelačić had won for the nation. The square was renamed Trg republike in 1945 and the statue – considered a potential rallying point for Croatian nationalism – was dismantled on the night of July 25, 1947. Its constituent parts were stored away in a basement until 1990, when it was restored to its rightful place – although the statue now faces in a different direction to that intended. Originally positioned with Jelačić’s drawn sabre pointing north (a gesture of defiance to the Austro-Hungarian imperial order), it now points southwards, as if to emphasize the historic rupture between Croatia and her Balkan neighbours.
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Cvjetni trg
Cvjetni trg
Throbbing heart of Zagreb’s pavement-café culture, pedestrianized Preradovićev trg, is referred to by most locals as Cvjetni trg (Flower Square), after the flower market that used to be held here until the area was cleaned up in the 1980s – a few sanitized florists’ pavilions still survive. Watching over the scene is Ivan Rendić’s 1895 statue of Petar Preradović (1818–72), a general in the Austro-Hungarian army who wrote some of the Croatian language’s most evocative romantic poetry. Behind the statue rises the grey form of the Serbian Orthodox Church (Pravoslavna crkva), an unassuming nineteenth-century building whose candlelit, icon-filled interior, heavy with the smell of incense, is worth a quick peek.
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Tkalciceva
Tkalciceva
Arguably the prettiest single street in the city, pedestrianized Tkalčićeva preserves a neat ensemble of the one- and two-storey, steep-roofed nineteenth-century houses that have largely disappeared elsewhere. There’s a smattering of boutiques and art galleries tucked into the street’s low-ceilinged mansions, although most of these are now occupied by the youthful café-bars that have transformed Tkalčićeva into the city’s prime area for drinking on warm summer evenings. In the first half of the twentieth century the whole area had a somewhat darker reputation, when Kožarska, the alleyway which runs parallel to Tkalčićeva to the west, served as the city’s red-light district, “reeking of debauchery, adultery, crime, drunkenness, and promiscuity”, in the words of diarist and novelist Miroslav Krleža. It was so popular with Hitler’s soldiers in World War II that the city authorities had to put up signs in German banning military personnel from entering. Also leading off to the west of Tkalčićeva is Krvavi most (“Bloody Bridge” – a reminder of the often violent disputes between Gradec and Kaptol), a street that links up with Radićeva, offering a short cut up to Gradec.
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The Grounded Sun and Nine Views
The Grounded Sun and Nine Views
Presiding mutely over the pavement cafés of Bogovićeva is the Grounded Sun (Prizemljeno sunce), a bronze sphere created by sculptor Ivan Kožarić in 1971 and placed here in 1994. Despite being tarnished by the elements and covered with graffiti, it remains one of Zagreb’s best-loved pieces of public art. In the mid-2000s conceptual artist Davor Preis decided to supply Kožarić’s sun with an accompanying installation entitled Nine Views, with metal spheres symbolizing the nine planets placed throughout Zagreb at distances that are in exact proportion to those of the real solar system. Thus Mercury appears as a tiny metal ball attached to the wall of a building at Margaretska 3, while Venus (Trg bana Jelačića 3), Earth (Varšavska 9) and Mars (Tkalčićeva 25) appear equally insignificant. The remaining planets are much further out in areas of Zagreb that you wouldn’t normally ever want to visit – culminating with Pluto, in a pedestrian underpass beneath the highway to Samobor. That said, tracing the solar system has become a highly popular form of urban safari – consult Zagreb tourist office or Preis’s own website (w www.daworp.com) for further details.
