MUSÉE DE HUMAC

This archaeological museum (Muzej Humac) belongs to the Franciscan monastery of Ljubuški-Humac founded in 1869 and dedicated to St. Anthony of Padua. Established in 1884, it is the oldest museum in Bosnia and Herzegovina, opened four years before the National Museum in Sarajevo. It houses an interesting small collection of objects discovered in western Herzegovina covering sixteen millennia, from the Upper Paleolithic to the Late Middle Ages. In three underground halls, we discover jewelry and weapons found in Illyrian burials, as well as Roman stelae, coins and statuettes from the nearby site of Gračine. The room devoted to the Middle Ages houses weapons and inscriptions from the fortress of Ljubuški, but above all the "Humac plaque" (see below). The whole is well presented, even if one regrets the absence of texts in English. In addition, the monastery has an art gallery on the theme of the "mother". This one gathers 250 works of unequal value. But it is worth noting the presence of works by the three greatest Croatian sculptors of the twentieth century, those of Ivan Meštrović (1883-1962), Frano Kršinić (1897-1982) and a moving mother doing her daughter's hair by Antun Augustinčić (1900-1979).

Humac Plaque (Humačka Ploča). This is the centerpiece of the museum. Dated to the 10th, 11th, or 12th century, this engraved stone tablet, 68 cm long, 60 cm wide, 15 cm thick, and 124 kg, is one of the oldest written traces of the Slavic languages in Yugoslavia. It bears an inscription written in the Bosančica alphabet, a local version of the Glagolitic alphabet developed by the Slavic evangelists Cyril and Methodius in the late 9th century. Composed of eighty letters and twenty-five words, the text is drawn "in a spiral" so that it can be read while walking around. It is the dedication made by a certain Krsmir and his wife Pavica for a church of the Archangel Michael. The "plaque" was identified in 1876 in the monastery grounds by the French diplomat and epigrapher Jean-Baptiste Évariste Charles Pricot de Sainte-Marie (1843-1899), then vice-consul in Ragusa (Dubrovnik). It remains an enigma to this day: neither the man named Krsmir, nor his wife, nor the church in question have been identified. It is also at the center of debates among Balkan linguists as to which current language the text is closest to. Not surprisingly, it is presented here by the Franciscans as a form of Croatian.