Muzej Croata insulanus (Prelog Town Museum)

Muzej Croata insulanus Grada Preloga is the town museum of Prelog in Međimurje. It opened on 19 March 2013 and was set up as a separate institution owned by the town in 2014. The name is Latin and plays on two things: the painter Ivan Lacković, who signed his work 'Croata', and the old description of Međimurje as an 'island' between the rivers Mura and Drava. So the 'islander Croat' of the title is a man of Međimurje, not of the Adriatic islands.

The museum occupies a historicist two-storey building at Glavna 33, on Prelog's main street. It went up at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries for the merchant Viktor Kramarić as a combined shop and house, and the Kramarić family appear as owners in the first land-registry entry of 1912. From 1929 to 1942 it belonged to Ljudevit Šoštarić, a Prelog bank director. In 1943 the Hungarian authorities, who then held Međimurje, opened a state agricultural school in it. It became socially owned property after the war, and the town of Prelog took it over in 1995.

The permanent exhibition on the first floor is called 'Naivna umjetnost – hrvatski ponos' (Naive Art, Croatian Pride). It is built on a donation from the collector Matija Berljak and presents pioneers of Croatian naive painting: Ivan Generalić and Franjo Mraz, among the first pupils of the school Krsto Hegedušić started at Hlebine in 1932, and Ivan Večenaj, Ivan Rabuzin, Mijo Kovačić, Slobodan Ivičević, Kata Dolenec and Franjo Ružman Brko. The largest group of works is by Lacković Croata himself. The pictures show the familiar subjects of the movement: Podravina landscapes, peasants at work, carts, mills, flowers and small houses, many painted in oil on the back of glass. There are also wooden sculptures by Ljubica Matulec and terracottas by Izidor Popijač.

Alongside the permanent display the museum runs a steady programme of temporary exhibitions, from local painters and the Prelog painting circle to caricature, and it has shown archaeological finds from the area around Prelog. It is a small museum and an easy stop on a walk along Glavna.