Nikola Tesla Technical Museum

The technical museum in Zagreb holds aircraft, locomotives, engines, fire equipment and a planetarium in a large hall, but its centrepiece is the Nikola Tesla cabinet, where working reconstructions of his apparatus are demonstrated by staff at set times through the day - including a Tesla coil throwing visible discharge, which is what people come for. Tesla was born in Smiljan in what is now Croatia, and the museum treats him as an engineer to be demonstrated rather than a figure to be mythologised. Beneath the building is a walk-through replica of a coal mine, staffed and toured on the hour.

History

The Technical Museum was founded in 1954 and opened to the public on 14 January 1963 in Savska Street. Its concept came from Božo Težak, a professor at the Faculty of Science in Zagreb, who wanted it to be both a classic museum of technology and a science centre that taught people to understand nature and engineering. The site at Savska 18 had been the first depot of the Zagreb trams from the end of 1891 until a new depot opened in Trešnjevka in 1936, and a piece of tram track turned up during work in the courtyard. In June 2015 the City Assembly renamed the museum after Nikola Tesla, and in 2024 it had 377,132 visitors, the third most visited museum in Croatia (Wikipedia, Nikola Tesla Technical Museum).

The main sights

• Tesla apparatus demonstrated live - the coil fired at set times.
• A replica mine underground - toured with a guide.
• Aircraft, engines and locomotives - in the main hall.
• A planetarium - with its own scheduled sessions.

When to go

Year round; the demonstrations run at fixed times, so check on arrival. Two to three hours.

Before you go

The demonstrations and mine tour run to a timetable and mostly in Croatian, with English on request or in summer. Displays elsewhere are old-fashioned and thinly labelled. It is a tram ride from the old centre.

Nearby

The Mimara Museum is closer to the centre; Zagreb's lower town is north-east.

Key facts