MUSÉE FRANCISCAIN ET GALERIE GORICA

Located in the Catholic monastery of Gorica, this museum (Franjevački Muzej i Galerija Gorica) is the most beautiful in the country. Of course, it cannot compete with the collection of the National Museum in Sarajevo. But it has a much more modern presentation. Its collections are varied and sometimes very specialized, especially those of archaeology, ethnography and ancient weapons. The institution was established in 1995 by combining the holdings of the monastery and the former regional museum, which was named after Hasan Brkić (1913-1965), a native of Livno who was an important supporter and leader of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the socialist period.

Archaeology. The centerpiece of the museum is displayed in a separate space. It is the oldest and largest woolen textile preserved in Europe: a "coat" 3 m long and 1.7 m wide, discovered in a burial mound in the Krupes polje in 1984. It dates from the 14th century BC. The 596 fragments that make it up were reconstructed in 2013 as part of a European project in a laboratory in Zagreb. The analysis determined that the fibers came from the hair of wild sheep or domesticated Balkan sheep. The exhibition continues in a room of 350^m2 where is first presented the wooden "coffin" in which was found a deceased dressed in the famous "coat". This is followed by a beautiful presentation, both chronological and thematic: Neolithic pottery, funerary objects from the Dalmatian culture, steles, weapons and fragments of Paleo-Christian churches from the Roman period, arrowheads from the Avars, who arrived from the Asian steppes in the 6th century. Everything is presented with care and clarity. However, we are concerned about an unscientific shortcut concerning the arrival of the "Croats" in the region in the seventh century: the differentiation between the South Slavic peoples (Croats, Serbs, Bosnians...) does not actually begin until two centuries later. The medieval objects remain no less magnificent: church bas-reliefs, jewelry, weapons, but also new fragments of clothing. The latter date "only" from the 14th century AD. They are no less rare. They come from the former Franciscan monastery of St. John of Livno, which disappeared during the Ottoman era.

Ethnography. This collection is one of the richest in the Balkans with about 5,000 objects from the sixteenth to the twentieth century from the former Hasan-Brkić Museum or collected for decades by Franciscan monks in the vicinity. It features both rich costumes and jewelry as well as everyday objects from families of all faiths. The embroidery on the clothes is superb. It is to the credit of this "Catholic" and "Croatian" museum to point out the similarities between communities. For example, with the exception of a few hanging crosses, the jewelry was similar for Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox women in Livno.

Numismatics. The oldest coin here is a silver didrachm issued in the fourth or third century B.C. by the Ausones, an Italic people from the city of Cales, now Calvi, in southern Italy. There is also a Celtic tetradrachm, but above all drachms from Apollonia of Illyria, a large Greek city in present-day Albania, which had close ties with the Dalmatians. The rest of the collection is made up of Roman and Byzantine coins, followed by those of the Bosnian, Croatian and Hungarian rulers who ruled the region. Surprise: no akçe, piastre or Ottoman sultani are exhibited, whereas Venetian ducats and Ragusan grossos are.

Military art. Livno was an important Ottoman military place, with up to 2,000 men in arms divided between the fortress and the city itself. This explains the presence of a wide range of yatagans. This curved Ottoman blade was used both as a sword and as a bayonet when attached to the barrel of a rifle. Some of them are superbly worked. Still among the weapons of the Ottoman period, the museum keeps kilijs, Albanian pistols, a Dalmatian rifle, a Polish sword with a wolf's head, a mace, a war hammer, or a scimitar, a curved sword of Persian origin, bearing here an Arabic inscription in gold indicating that it must have belonged to an officer. This is followed by a collection of firearms used by the belligerents during the two world wars, from Italy, Germany, Slovakia, the United Kingdom, the United States and the USSR.

Art gallery. The gallery is very poor in old works - a few pseudobaroque religious paintings from the 19th century - but it is full of modern creations, some of which are very interesting. A large part of the collection consists of works by the Livno-born painter Gabrijel Jurkić (1886-1974), who spent the last eighteen years of his life here in the monastery with his wife. His sober winter landscapes of the region are quite touching. For the rest, it is more debatable. Art collectors since the 1950s, the monks of Livno have also acquired very contemporary works such as a representation of the Last Supper by the Bosnian-Croatian artist Vlatko Blažanović (born 1953) or this Beast by the Bosnian-Slovenian sculptor Jakov Brdar (born 1949).