About Croatian folk tales

The MUSEUM OF LOST TALES is a place where we revisit nearly forgotten beings that wander freely through swampy forests, soft, damp meadows, and old river streams and ditches. They glide along moonlit paths through reeds, avoiding gardens and courtyards, treading only by secret trails and savouring the delicate scents of silence.

They do not need city keys; instead, they may slip through keyholes, cracks, and loopholes, making their nests in deep wells, lurk in courtyards or underneath the staircases with vanishing steps, hiding under tables, and crouching in shadowy corners.

The museum becomes their temporary refuge, a sanctuary in murky arches or dim corners, on the delicate threshold between fantasy and reality – dreams and reality.

Detached from everyday reality, these hidden creatures observe and appraise us.

The witches, Hags and Mares, Imps, the Unseen and the bogarts, Murks and all other creatures of midnight, dawn, or twilight that traverse the walls of our dreams.

They emerge from realms beyond our daily existence, originating from a night realms and its dreamscapes, settling in our memories and dwelling upon an imagination. Those beings are timeless, enigmatic, flickering, restless, elusive, capricious, untamed, unique, agile, playful, vivid, unrestrained.

They are creatures of Mother Earth, with their layered and contradictory personalities—both divine and demonic—with all the time of this world and the next at their disposal. They listen and whisper in the dark, shifting seamlessly from one story to another.

They seek only a moment to be heard.

Amidst the clamour of our thoughts…

Zdenko Bašić