A toaster, a mobile phone, an axe, a misshapen sweater, a full-length mirror. Each, by itself, might be a random, even nondescript, object. Except that each is accompanied by a personal testimony, alternately sad, hilarious, ironic, or sometimes downright scary, about how the object marks the end of a relationship.
This is the central motif of the Museum of Broken Relationships in Croatia’s capital, Zagreb. Testimonies and artefacts come from all over the world, from people of all ages, races, and nationalities.
The museum was founded by two Zagreb-based artists, Olinka Vištica, a film producer, and Dražen Grubišić, a sculptor. After their four-year love relationship ended in 2003, the two joked about setting up a museum to house leftover personal items. Three years later, the joke turned into a real project.
Grubišić and Vištica understood that for people to move on from a break-up certain things have to be discarded, but sometimes that can be hard to do. They started asking friends to donate objects left behind from their break-ups, and the collection was born.
After its first public showing in 2006, the collection went on a four-year tour to Argentina, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany, Macedonia, the Philippines, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Parts of the collection have been traveling ever since. With superb timing, it arrived at York Castle Museum as the UK was beginning its public and messy divorce from the European Union following the Brexit referendum. On its travels, the collection gathered new items donated by members of the public; lovelorn Berliners alone donated more than 30 objects in 2007.
In 2010, Vištica and Grubišić found a permanent space in Zagreb’s Upper Town. Open seven days a week, with a café inside, the museum attracts thousands of visitors a year, including many foreign tourists. It’s a small museum, so only a limited number of the 3,000-plus objects in its collection can be displayed. And more submissions arrive every month, some from visitors who feel inspired or compelled to share their break-up stories.
To save embarrassment---or potential libel suits—each testimony is anonymous, with only the city, country and the dates or length of the relationship listed as attribution.
There’s the full-length mirror where a woman applied the final touches to her dress and make-up before leaving for the evening to visit “friends.” When her husband found out she was cheating on him, the relationship ended. She moved out but left the mirror. It was a constant reminder of her deception, so he was happy to pack it up and donate it.
In “A holy water bottle shaped as the Virgin Mary,” a woman describes meeting her “transitory lover” in Amsterdam in 1988. “He was from Peru and discovering Europe by train. We met at the Buddha Disco. Not long after that we bumped into each other on the street, and he went home with me and stayed for about two months. Suddenly he was gone. I found a goodbye note and this little statue which he had specifically brought from Peru in the hope of meeting a new love. What he didn’t know was that I had once opened his bag and found a whole plastic bag full of these bottles. I never saw him again.”
It seemed wonderfully apposite that Stephanie and I visited the Museum of Broken Relationships on the first day of our May 2022 vacation in Croatia to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary.
Breaking up may be hard to do, but if you’re going to do it, you might as well write about it and leave a memento.