Until recently the mass migration of Zagreb’s citizens to the coast meant that the summer going-out scene slackened off at the end of June, and didn’t really pick up again until early September. Even now, conventional wisdom dictates that the InMusic Rock Festival at the end of June, celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2015, marks the end of Zagreb’s summer season rather than the beginning.
However the sharp increase in predominantly young, nightlife-savvy visitors has radically changed the habits of the locals, who are now far more likely to stick around in Zagreb over the summer and spend at least part of the holiday soaking up the increasingly vibrant atmosphere of their home city. The Tkalciceva dining-and-drinking strip now boasts the kind of summer-long buzz that simply didn’t exist a couple of years ago.
And there are quite simply more things to do. The recent inauguration of outdoor art and gastronomy festivals like Gourmingle and The Courtyards has lent a new sense of verve and excitement to the sunny season. Blockbuster exhibitions of art and history (traditionally held in the spring) are nowadays scheduled to cover at least a couple of the crucial summer months—the Bauhaus, European Symbolism and Auguste Rodin shows are just three of the attractions laid on in 2015.
Elsewhere the look and texture of Zagreb has not radically changed. The one new signature building in the city centre is the Music Academy on Trg marsala Tita, a grid-patterned cube topped off by a rainbow-coloured cone designed by veteran Croatian modernist Milan Sosteric. Headlines were grabbed not so much by the building itself as the installation directly in front of it—a soaring silver needle and a golden-coloured sphere. The latter is a direct homage to Ivan Kozaric’s similarly planetoid ‘Grounded Sun’ sculpture on the pedestrianised Bogoviceva nearby. You can say what you like about Zagreb, but it has never been short of balls.
