The Archaeological Museum Split was founded on 22 August 1820. This is a very significant date not only for Croatian archaeology and the entire Croatian museum activity, but for the city of Split, the entire region and the Republic of Croatia as a whole as well. The Archaeological Museum Split is likewise the oldest museum institution in Southeast Europe.
The Museum was not always in its current location. Until 1868, it was located in a building next to the eastern wall of the Diocletian Palace; nothing remains of this structure today. The construction of the Museum’s current building was finished immediately before the start of World War I. Work on the new Museum building, designed by Viennese architects August Kirstein and Friedrich Ohmann, began in March 1912 and lasted until June 1914. This makes the building of the Archaeological Museum Split, along with the 1888 building of the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb and partially the 1880 Strossmayer Gallery of Old Masters in the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the oldest building that was purpose-built, i.e. built exclusively for a museum in Croatia.
The new building housed a large exhibition hall for smaller artefacts, a garden with a lapidarium for stone statues, and a basement that served as a storage area. The available space was large enough to suit the Museum’s needs until the 1960s, when ideas began to form about expanding the Museum by constructing a new building in the back garden.
Until 1910, when the Ethnographic Museum was founded, there were no other museums or galleries in Split other than the Archaeological Museum, which is why it also housed those remnants of our history that would otherwise not have been placed there. This was due to the care of its directors, who were interested not only in archaeology, but also in history, old and rare books, maps, archival records, art, etc.
In 1878, Mihovil Glavinić and Josip Alačević initiated the publication of a journal called Bullettino di archeologia e storia dalmata. Its program, according to the authors, was stated in the name of the journal and consisted of archaeology and history of Dalmatia. Bullettino was first published in Italian. Although the Croatian language was not excluded from the journal, Italian was kept until the end of World War I, when the journal was translated into Croatian as Vjesnik za arheologiju i historiju dalmatinsku (Vol. XLIII). The next name change happened in 2005, when the journal was renamed as Vjesnik za arheologiju i povijest dalmatinsku (Vol. 98), redesigned, and issued in a larger format. In 2014, starting with Vol. 107, the journal was once again renamed and reverted to the recognizable name Vjesnik za arheologiju i historiju dalmatinsku. This museum journal is the oldest and most important professional archaeological journal in the Republic of Croatia. According to professional criteria, it has A1 status, which denotes the highest scientific ranking.
