Dear ladies and gentlemen, dear fellow citizens, friends of the National Museum Kraljevo, colleagues, I would like to thank you for the selfless support you gave us during 2023 and which was extremely valuable to us.
The year, which we are at the very end of, was extremely dynamic for our institution: on the one hand, we had two guest exhibitions dedicated to the natural sciences, such as “Green and Black: Story of Tea”,, from the Natural History Museum in Belgrade, and “Behind objectivity” from the Center for the Promotion of Science from Belgrade, and on the other hand, the visit of our dear colleagues from the Museum of Herzegovina in Trebinje, with their big exhibition about the poet and diplomat Jovan Dučić. This year we also had two exhibitions of fine artists from Kraljevo: the exhibition by Jelena Šalinić Terzić “Styx” and the exhibition of drawings by her student Željko Radović.
As part of the “Museum of Music” project, an exhibition of archival materials about the group “Smak” was hosted, but three films from the series “Kraljevčani” were also filmed in co-production with the Association “Sidža”. In the context of the story about the group “Smak”, we are talking about a film about our fellow citizen Slobodan Stojanović Kepa, the drummer of the group “Smak”, which was projected in the Gallery of the National Museum Kraljevo, where Kepa was present. Films were also made about the Kraljevo group “Gamma Ray” and the Big Band of the Music School “Stevan Mokranjac” in Kraljevo.
Finally, we had exhibitions by our curators: the exhibition “The World of Numismatics” which presented a large part of the Numismatic Collection, then the exhibition “Children at War: Serbian Refugee Homes in Mataruška Banja 1942-1944” as a poignant story of the suffering and rescue of children during the terrible war destruction, and finally “Mataruška Banja: Beneath the Cold Linden Trees, near the Fast Ibar River…”, which has just been opened, and which is entirely dedicated to this significant Spa in our immediate surroundings.
This year too, we continued our cooperation with the Faculty of Law of the University of Belgrade and the Institute for Political Studies from Belgrade, and for the third year in a row we organized the scientific conference “Publications in the Development of the Society and State III”, this time under the title “Public Word and Public condemnation”. This was followed in September by another one-day scientific conference organized by the same actors, entitled “Kosovo and Metohija in the 20th century: Historical and Geopolitical Review”. Our publishing activity is also related to cooperation with the mentioned institutions, so this year, in addition to the regular publication of the journal “Our Past”, the scientific and professional newsletter of the National Museum Kraljevo and the Historical Archive Kraljevo, we also published the collection of papers “Publicism in the Development of the Society and State I” in which the works of the first in a series of scientific conferences with this topic, held in 2021, were collected.
The year was also marked by field research by our teams: in Gokčanica and the Ibar mines in Baljevac.
This year, our Official Internet Presentation has done a lot to improve its organization, as well as the quality and dynamics of publishing, as evidenced by the figure of about half a million users reached by our posts on social networks. In addition, the Editorial Board of the Official Internet Presentation had a number of contacts and collaborations with various actors, including Wikimedia Serbia, whose intern has been processing concepts related to the history and heritage of Kraljevo for three months in our institution.
We are proud of the fact that we are and will always be a house with open doors, ready to work to make visitors more informed, richer, more fulfilled, as well as the fact that, together with our fellow citizens and all other dear guests, we work to preserve and nurture heritage.
Finally, I would like to take the opportunity to wish you a happy New Year, and much success and health in 2024, as well as to invite you to participate in our programs, visit us at the National Museum Kraljevo and follow our work on our website and social networks.
Darko Gučanin
historian, archivist
Director of the National Museum Kraljevo