Almost every building a visitor admires in Zagreb exists because of an earthquake, and the reason so much of the city is currently propped up is another one. The story of this city is two hills that hated each other and two mornings when the ground moved.
The two hills
Zagreb began as two separate towns on neighbouring hills with a stream between them.
Kaptol was the church’s. King Ladislaus founded the bishopric in 1094, and the settlement grew around the cathedral, walled and fortified against the Ottomans in the sixteenth century.
Gradec was the merchants’. After the Mongol invasion of 1242, during which King Béla IV sheltered on the hill, he issued the Golden Bull making Gradec a free royal city — self-governing, exempt from feudal dues, allowed to hold markets and to elect its own judge.
Two towns, two hundred metres apart, one owing everything to a bishop and the other to a king.
They fought about mills, tolls, land and grazing, sometimes with lawyers and sometimes with weapons. The bridge over the Medveščak stream between them was called Krvavi most — the Bloody Bridge — and it was not a metaphor.
They were finally amalgamated into a single city called Zagreb in 1850, less than two centuries ago.
Between the hills and the boom
Under the Habsburgs, Zagreb was a provincial administrative town of no great size — 10,000 people at the end of the eighteenth century, 30,000 by 1880.
What it did have was politics. The Illyrian movement of the 1830s and 40s, led by Ljudevit Gaj, standardised the Croatian literary language and built a national cultural project in a city under Hungarian administrative pressure. Gaj’s newspaper, the reading rooms, the theatre and the academy all date from this period, and they mattered far beyond the city’s size.
Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer founded the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1866 and gave his art collection to the nation; the modern University of Zagreb was constituted in 1874.
9 November 1880
At a quarter past seven in the morning, an earthquake of about magnitude 6.3 struck, centred just north of the city.
Damage was extensive. The cathedral was badly hurt. Around 1,700 buildings were affected in a town of 30,000 people.
What followed is the reason Zagreb looks the way it does.
The city did not merely repair. It rebuilt itself as a capital — and the timing put that reconstruction squarely in the most confident decades of Habsburg central Europe.
Hermann Bollé, a German architect who had trained in Vienna and Cologne, rebuilt the cathedral in neo-Gothic with its two 105-metre spires, tiled the roof of St Mark’s with the coats of arms, and designed the arcades of Mirogoj. He worked on dozens of buildings in and around the city.
The engineer Milan Lenuci laid out the Green Horseshoe — a U of eight linked squares and parks around the new lower town, one of the finest pieces of nineteenth-century planning in Europe.
The Croatian National Theatre opened in 1895, the Art Pavilion in 1898, the Oktogon arcade in 1899, the electric tram in 1910.
In thirty years a provincial town of 30,000 acquired the full apparatus of a capital city. It was, in effect, arguing for a status it did not yet have.
The twentieth century
Zagreb spent it inside four different states without moving.
Austria-Hungary until 1918. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, proclaimed in Zagreb itself in October 1918 and rapidly disappointing. The Independent State of Croatia, the Ustaša puppet regime of 1941–45, which made this city the capital of one of the more murderous of the Axis satellites. Then socialist Yugoslavia, in which Zagreb was a federal republic capital, built Novi Zagreb across the river, and hosted the 1987 Universiade.
Independence came in 1991, and with it the war. The Banski dvori on St Mark’s Square was bombed from the air on 7 October 1991 with President Tuđman inside. In May 1995, cluster rockets were fired into the city centre over two days, killing seven civilians and wounding around two hundred — an attack on a capital city’s shopping streets that is very little known outside Croatia.
EU membership came in 2013, the euro and Schengen together on 1 January 2023.
22 March 2020
At 6:24 in the morning, an earthquake of magnitude 5.5 struck, centred seven kilometres north of the centre. The strongest since 1880.
A fifteen-year-old girl died of her injuries. Around 26,000 buildings were damaged. The top of the cathedral’s south spire snapped off.
It happened in the first week of the coronavirus lockdown. A population that had been ordered to stay indoors ran into the street; a population ordered not to gather stood in crowds. The maternity hospital was evacuated into the cold with newborns in nurses’ arms.
Nine months later, on 29 December 2020, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake destroyed the town of Petrinja fifty kilometres away, killed seven people, and shook Zagreb hard again.
What has and has not happened since
The scaffolding you see across Gornji Grad and Kaptol is from these two mornings.
Reconstruction has been slow, and this is a live grievance rather than a neutral observation. Funding was secured from the EU and the state; the legal framework had to be built from nothing; ownership of nineteenth-century apartment buildings is fragmented among dozens of individual owners, each of whom must consent. Progress in the first years was very poor and the government was criticised heavily for it.
The comparison people in Zagreb make is with 1880 — when a town of 30,000, with no EU funds and no modern state, rebuilt itself into a capital within a generation.
Whether that comparison is fair is another argument. But it is the one the city is having, and it is worth knowing about while you are standing in front of a propped-up facade on Kaptol.
The practical version, and what it means for a visit, is on the 2020 earthquakes page.