Museums of Yugoslavia (Great Museums of the World)

Yugoslavia boasts of no single museum that can compare with the great museums of the world, such as the Louvre, the British Museum, the Uffizi Gallery or the Vatican collections. In comparison with those of other, more fortunate, wealthier lands, Yugoslavia's museums were founded much later, due not only to the centuries of Turkish domination suffered by some of its states, but also to the resulting cultural lag and relative poverty after liberation, not to speak of the storms of war, which proved particularly disastrous to art treasures assembled in any one place. It has been of course difficult to make up for this delay. Nevertheless, Yugoslavia's museums contain some remarkable collections, owing to the fact that for several millennia the people who lived on her soil experienced the same urge to create as people throughout the world. Even more, geography and history have tended to transform the country into one vast museum, whose treasures—paradoxical as this may seem—remain in large part still hidden underground, undiscovered, awaiting the systematic search of expert archaeologists, or the chance discoveries of people who dig the ground to satisfy their everyday needs, thus unearthing the primeval base of their existence.