Why Zany Zagreb's a charmingly barmy tonic for the winter blues



Alphabetically, the Croatian capital of Zagreb may be at the bottom of everyone’s list, but, in fact, it’s an A-star city break, especially in winter.



There’s just as much to do indoors here as there is outdoors. One minute, you’re standing on ancient cobblestones in front of St Mark’s Church, with multi-coloured roof tiles that look like they’ve been put together by medieval monks with a liking for Lego.



The next, you’re round the corner, in a very 21st-century museum, which displays a dramatic, and often heartbreaking, collection of objects left over from love affairs gone wrong. Like the axe with which one woman broke up her lover’s furniture while he was away on holiday with his new girlfriend.



Shout it from the rooftops: Zagreb is bursting with pretty architecture and fascinating history

Or the blue chiffon top a wife wore out to the lunch at which her husband told her he was running off.

There’s an electric iron a groom used to press his wedding suit (‘The only thing left from my marriage’), and, even more bizarrely, a prosthetic leg which, in the words of its wearer, proved to be of sturdier material than his affair with the female social worker who helped him apply for it from the health authorities.



In the museum shop, you can buy broken-relationship stationery, including a pencil saying ‘Snap Here In Anger’, and a rubber bearing the words ‘Bad Memories Eraser’.



Not 100 yards away, though, stands a lovely, little apothecary’s shop, dating back to 1355. Beside

it is a primitive stone gate housing a Madonna-and-child painting that miraculously survived a citywide fire in 1731, and which still attracts hordes of candle-lighting worshippers to this day.

Colourful: St Mark's Church, Zagreb puts one in mind of Lego

The place where I’m staying, the old-style Palace Hotel, seems to have had a celebrity following. Star visitors are framed (Sophia Loren, Orson Welles). This is a city where the old and the new rub shoulders: quaint alleyways join up with ramrod-straight boulevards; sleek new trams zoom alongside

the creaking old funicular railway that takes you from the 19th-century Lower Town (Donji Grad) to the 13th-century Upper (Gornji Grad).



And while immaculately-dressed pensioners meet for pastries in the Art Deco delight that is the Kavana Gradska coffee house, nose-studded teenagers cram into the underground shopping centre

beside the main railway station to stock up on Saturday night booze (a litre of beer here is 50p in

the shops, 60p in a bar).



Palace attraction: Actress Sophia Loren has visited Zagreb

It’s only been in recent years that Zagreb has started to emerge as a tourist destination, shaking off both the dreary cobwebs of communism, then the domination of Serbian Belgrade, which, until the Balkan War and the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, served as the ugly sister in the relationship.



All of which means that unlike other European capitals, Zagreb has had to try that bit harder to bring in Britons who, if they come to Croatia at all, tend to go directly to Dubrovnik and the coast.



Nowhere is this determination to be different more visible than in the range of quirky, little museums.

Like the Museum Of Blindness, for example, where you are given a white stick and invited to undertake an experiment in a completely blacked-out room, performing a variety of tasks sounds and smells), without the use of your eyes.

A night-vision video camera then allows you to watch your stumbling efforts back on film. At the extraordinary Museum Of Hunting, you can sit in armchairs made of antlers and get up close and personal with all manner of stuffed beasts, including lions, crocodiles and 8ft-tall grizzly bears that tower over you, claws at the ready.



Equally jumbled, but just as charming, is the Technical Museum — a Wacky Races collection of vehicles, featuring everything from submarines to steam trains, fighter aircraft to fire engines, crammed into a large industrial shed.



And while you can trundle round the usual Renaissance works of art at the Strossmayer Gallery Of Old Masters, an altogether more accessible alternative is the Museum Of Naive Art. This is a dazzling

collection of almost comic-book paintings by untutored artists, capturingthe look and feel of rural life in the form of super-snowy fields and exaggeratedly potato-headed peasants.

Climb through history: One way to see the city is to take a ride on the funicular railway

What’s more, you can get a taste of Croatian country living for yourself, by taking a trip to the Museum Of Peasant Riots, housed in a lovely stone mansion in the surrounding mountains.



Here you find out that not only did their Peasants’ Revolt happen two centuries later than our own, but that it was legal for aristocrats to own serfs right up until 1848. There ’s more than a reverberation of the rustic in the national cuisine, too.



Meat is to the fore, in the form of pork and ham hocks, plus powerfully tasty sausages, served with

large chunks of bread or lasagne-like pasta sheets called mlinci.

It’s hard to beat the mixed-meat platter (£7.50) at the lovely, brick-arched Vinodol restaurant in the Lower Town, and equally hard to beat the view at the hilltop Pod Grickim Topom in the Upper Town.



And not even the most stubborn cold can compete with the wormwood liqueur called pelinkovac,

which somehow combines the power of alcohol with the soothing, aromatic properties of warm fruit.



There’s no doubt about it, a trip to the Croatian capital is a fiery tonic for the winter blues.



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