In Zagreb, heartbreak becomes a collection
The Museum of Broken Relationships turns the aftermath of a breakup into something visitors can walk through. Its exhibits are not prized for age or craftsmanship: they are ordinary possessions—things once shared, given, or left behind—paired with accounts of the relationships they came from.
That pairing changes how an object reads. A household item may look unremarkable on a shelf, but its plaque supplies the missing context: who kept it, what it came to represent, and how the relationship ended. The museum’s subject is therefore not simply romance or loss. It is the way a private history can cling to a physical thing long after the people involved have gone their separate ways.
A personal story, made public
Contributors send objects and explanations from around the world. In the galleries, those individual accounts sit beside one another, creating an unusual kind of travel experience: visitors move through many intimate histories rather than through a collection organized around a single period, place, or type of artifact.
The display also leaves room for the visitor’s own interpretation. Because the objects are familiar, their emotional weight is not obvious at first glance; the story beside each one supplies the turn. A discarded possession becomes meaningful not because it is rare, but because someone remembers what happened around it.
