MEMORIES OF A BAN

The Jelačić Legacy in the Croatian History Museum

 

Marking the 150th anniversary of the death of Ban Jelačić (1801 – 1859), the Croatian History Museum presents the numerically biggest and one of the most important family legacies kept in the collections of the museum. This is the Legacy of the gentle, baronial and countly branch of the second line of the Jelačićes, a Legacy that started its museum life in the first years of the activity of the National Museum in Zagreb, and whose greater part tells, above all, of life and role of ban Josip Jelačić.

Josip Jelačić (Petrovaradin, October 16 1801 – Zagreb, May 20 1859), ban of the Kingdom of Dalmatia, Croatia and Slavonia, was active at the time of the national movements and revolutionary ferments, the beginnings of the shaping of modern civil society. As ban of the Kingdom of Dalmatia, Croatia and Slavonia, civil administrator of Dalmatia and Rijeka and commander of the military frontier regiments, for a short time in 1848 he provided a formal unification for the Croatian lands within the Habsburg Empire. A sign of Jelačić's public activity aimed at the development of national, cultural and educational institutions, the only possible activity at the time of Bach's absolutism, is constituted by the ban's personal gift to the Museum in 1856. Presenting a portrait of himself to the National Museum, Jelačić not only with his own example wished to draw attention to the importance of preserving the heritage, but in a way initiated the future formation of the Jelačić Legacy.

The Jelačić Legacy in the Croatian History Museum came into being over a fairly long period of time, and today it contains about 700 heterogeneous museum objects that belonged to ban Josip Jelačić and members of his families. The Legacy was formed gradually, primarily through gifts of the Jelačić family itself. The nucleous of the Legacy consists of objects that the members of the family gave or intended to go to the Archaelogical and Historical Croatian National Museum in Zagreb as a unit. The larger part of this objects came to the Museum in 1937, as the Estate of Anka Jelačić, the daughter of ban's younger brother Juro and the last heiress of Novi Dvori.

The selection of over 300 various museum objects (from the end of the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century) at the exhibition is presented ambientally (thanks to extant photographs taken in the 1920s), as a family memorial the objects of which the ban's heirs kept lovingly stored in the family estate of Novi Dvori. The chronological and thematic structure of the exhibition enables us to present the Legacy biographically in the endeavour to be comprehensive in its presentation of ban's life, the fate of Novi Dvori after his death, and ban's presence in Croatian society to this day..

„My name belongs to history. It will write of me, but about what was hidden in my heart, it will say nothing.“

Those are the words of Josip Jelačić towards the end of his life, as if addressing them to his critics, aware of the far-reaching importance of his role in Croatian history, without even guessing that he was to become a legend.

 

Exhibition devised and catalogue written by Andreja Smetko, curator of The Collections of objects from Every day Life.
Exhibition curated by Matea Brstilo Rešetar, curator of The Heraldry and Sphragistic Collection.
Exhibition design Nikolina Jelavić Mitrović.