Croatia's underrated capital — Museum of Broken Relationships, Baroque old town, and the best coffee culture in the Balkans
Zagreb is bypassed by most tourists heading to Dubrovnik or the Dalmatian coast, and this is the city's best feature — it remains an authentic Central European capital of cafes, Baroque upper-town streets, open-air markets, and one of the most inventive museum scenes in Europe. Croatian food (štrukli, a Zagreb specialty of fresh cottage cheese in boiled or baked dough; fuži pasta with Istrian truffles; kulen spiced pork sausage from Slavonia; kremšnita vanilla custard cake from Samobor; roasted lamb from the Kvarner islands) reflects a country at the intersection of Central European, Mediterr…
Zagreb developed from two medieval rival settlements on adjacent hills — Gradec (the civil and merchant settlement, granted royal status by King Béla IV in 1242 after the Mongol invasion) and Kaptol (the ecclesiastical center with its cathedral, now reconstructed after multiple earthquakes). The two communities, separated by a stream called Medveščak, fought each other repeatedly for centuries before merging administratively in 1850. Zagreb served as the capital of the Croatian-Slavonian-Dalmatian Kingdom within the Habsburg Empire, the center of the Illyrian movement for South Slavic cultura…