Croatian sights - Staro Selo

The town of Kumrovec in Krapina-Zagorje

is a little under an hour from Zagreb by car.

A place to go to get a glimpse of old rural Croatian life.

Kumrovec's claim to fame is that it is the birthplace of 
the late communist president of Yugoslavia,
marshal Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980), 
His family home was turned into a museum in 1953.
Next to the house (above pic^) is the 1948 bronze statue
of Tito, made by Antun Augustinčić.
Inside the house(below) is Tito history.

 The birth house of Tito (built in 1860 as the first brickwork house in the village) opened in 1953 to feature the Memorial Museum of Marshal Tito.

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Today, besides the memorial museum, the major attraction,

is 'Staro Selo' (old village)
link:kumrovec.hr/museum-staro-selo/

"An open air Ethnological Museum" with nicely preserved village houses and barns, displaying exhibitions of artifacts related to the life and work of Zagorje peasants in the 19th/20th century, set in a beautifully landscaped setting.

FYI:
 I looked up the word ethnological -<<<great trivia word!>>>

{ethnology, n. The branch of anthropology that analyzes and compares human cultures, as in social structure, language, religion, and technology; cultural anthropology.} 

 (The reconstruction and redecoration of these structures started in 1977.)

Driving from Zagreb, the village is easy to find and has a large, free parking lot. The entrance fee was 20 kuna pp. The day we went, we spent a few hours walking the grounds with Jack, having the place pretty much to ourselves;

only ran into a few other people, a barn cat, and a few chickens.  

It was a perfect way to spend a sunny, warm, spring day. The grounds are beautiful and most of the hundred-year-old farmhouses are open to enter.  Some display family life and some of them shops like a blacksmith's, flax, and pottery, quite a few barns with drying corn hanging from the sides, old tools, and pretty gardens.  It was a worthwhile place to visit for both the Tito history and to see a different part of early Croatian life. 

Internet facts: Tito was born Josip Broz on May 7 (or 25), 1892, the seventh of fifteen children of a peasant (poor farmer) family of Kumrovec, a village near Zagreb, Croatia. [then Austria-Hungary] —died May 4, 1980, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia [now in Slovenia]), He was secretary-general (later president) of the Communist Party (League of Communists) of Yugoslavia (1939–80), supreme commander of the Yugoslav Partisans (1941–45) and the Yugoslav People’s Army (1945–80), and marshal (1943–80), premier (1945–53), and president (1953–80) of Yugoslavia. 

Tito was the chief architect of the “second Yugoslavia,” a socialist federation that lasted from World War II until 1991. He was the first Communist leader in power to defy Soviet hegemony, a backer of independent roads to socialism (sometimes referred to as “national communism”)…

The irony of Tito’s remarkable life is that he created the conditions for the eventual destruction of his lifelong effort. Instead of allowing the process of democratization to establish its own limits, he constantly upset the work of reformers while failing to satisfy their adversaries. He created a federal state, yet he constantly fretted over the pitfalls of decentralization. He knew that the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and others could not be integrated within some new supra nation, nor would they willingly accept the hegemony of any of their number; yet his supranational Yugoslavism frequently smacked of unitarism. He promoted self-management but never gave up on the party’s monopoly of power. He permitted broad freedoms in science, art, and culture that were unheard of in the Soviet bloc, but he kept excoriating the West. He preached peaceful coexistence but built an army that, in 1991, delivered the coup de grâce to the dying Yugoslav state. At his death, the state treasury was empty and political opportunists unchecked. He died too late for constructive change, too early to prevent chaos.

WRITTEN BY: Ivo Banac 

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Josip-Broz-Tito https://www.total-croatia-news.com/politics/16522-the-legacy-of-marshal-tito https:/ (can’t cut and paste, but good read)http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/josip-broz-tito-4333.php (good stats)