Ethnographic Museum

The Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade is one of the oldest museums in the Balkans.

The Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade was founded in 1901, when the Ethnographic Department was separated from the National Museum of Serbia. The inauguration of the first permanent exhibition of the museum was organized on 20 September 1904, during the centennial of the First Serbian Uprising. During the first years of its work, the activities of the Ethnographic Museum were focused on the purchase of museum items and the presentation of the Kingdom of Serbia abroad.

In World War I, a large number of museum items were destroyed, as well as the documentation and the library. The museum library was re-established in 1920. Today, its holdings contain about 60,000 publications: 33,000 books and about 27,000 journals dealing with ethnology, anthropology and related scholarly disciplines.

During World War II, museum objects were packed and removed from the building in which the museum was housed at that time. After the war, the museum was moved into the building of the Belgrade Stock Exchange at 13 Studentski trg Street.

The museum collections currently contain about 200,000 items, 56,000 of which are ethnographic objects.

Until today, eight permanent exhibitions and about 300 temporary exhibitions were opened in the Ethnographic Museum. The permanent exhibition occupies three levels of the building. Today, the Ethnographic Museum houses a large number of ethnographic objects, distributed in private collections (furniture, jewelry, traditions, costumes, folk architecture, industry, animal husbandry, transport, cult objects, etc), has one of the richest specialized libraries in the Balkans and publishes professional publications, has a great conservation service that handles virtually all types of materials, has a large exhibition space, organizes extensive ethnographic research and has a lot of will and knowledge to carry out an ethnological and anthropological study of the 19th century.