Let us preserve the cultural heritage,
let us collect it at one place – the museum.
Jovan Sterija Popovic, 1843

The National Museum in Belgrade, museum of a complex type, the most significant, the oldest and central Serbian museum, after a hundred and sixty years of growth and development – from collecting rarities to comprehensive presentation of cultural heritage of Serbia, central Balkans and Europe – has 34 archeological, numismatic, artistic and historical collections today.

A different, new kind of approach to the past emerged in Serbia in the second half of the eighteenth century, enflamed by national awakening in the early nineteenth century, and shaped in the new historical and cultural circumstances of the then Serbia. By the decree of the then Minister of Education Jovan Sterija Popovic, issued on May 10, 1844, the National Museum was founded under the name Museum serbski. Although the museum and its content have changed considerably since its foundation, its role and purpose have remained constant: the National Museum is dedicated to protection, interpretation and promotion of a multi-layered cultural heritage of Serbia and the region. The Museum has grown and developed, often thanks to enthusiasm and firm devotion of individuals, from a single safe in the Ministry of Education, with a fund entered into records under 79 ordinal numbers, to current collections which include the most important, most significant and most representative testimonies of the region's historical and cultural development.

The date of the founding of the National Museum simultaneously marks the beginning of an institutionalized, systematic protection of cultural treasures in Serbia, gathering and exploring, systematic care for movable and immovable cultural heritage. This beginning is also marked by constant search, constant attempts to become independent, be legislated, educate the personnel, settle and present the artifacts and artistic work Serbia inherited to audience in a proper manner. It is the time of the first archeological digging in Serbia, on Mount Rudnik (1865), when the Museum received its first foreign art paintings as the Princess Julija's gift (1864), when it opened for visitors for the first time (1871), when it organized its first exhibition of a modern sculpture, authored by Petar Ubavkic, as well as the first painter exhibition, by woman painter Katarina Ivanovic (1882), the time of the first foreign art collection being founded, based on gifts of Italian paintings from Berthold Lippay, painter of the Slovakian origin (1891). The first catalogue was printed 1900., permanent exhibition organized to display all the collections 1904, the first exhibition organized abroad 1924.

Although acting as a contemporary institution and prime mover for many activities, up until the thirties of the twentieth century the museum was mostly marked by `fatal temporariness`, defined by general cultural policy, and scarred by especially turbulent history of the Balkans.

Despite unenviable conditions, moves, destruction of collections in World War One, the Museum started to grow from the beginning of the twentieth century, with a clear concept of collecting solely archeological material and works of art. The richness of the starting collections served for founding many other significant museums in Serbia, among others the Ethnographic, Historical, and Museum of Natural History. Museum - at the time under the name of the Museum of History and Arts – began its second important phase: along with taking care of movable and immovable monuments, it became a source of valuable information about the worth and importance of national, and now international, cultural heritage. Finally, with permanent residence in the building of the New Court, the museum The Museum became an attractive and living place, with extended exhibition activity. The Museum of History and Arts, merged with the Museum of Contemporary Art, opened ceremoniously in 1936 under the name of the Museum of Prince Paul. Permanent exhibition, whose prominent works included gifts from Prince Paul and foreign donors, attracted people with variety, importance, contemporariness. International exhibitions happened with exceptional frequency, simultaneously with intensive exploration and archeological excavations of very significant sites, from Trebeniste, through Stobi, to Herakleja. Contemporaries claim: `We finally have a European-style museum, in which monuments and testimonies of our history and culture have been collected with love, refined taste and unprecedented abundance, a museum representative of our history, a museum representative of our country, which, with a respectable, rich and varied series of artistic pieces and historical antiquities, offers a lively and imposing image, evocative of our nation's centurial cultural and artistic achievement, as well as its various antecedents from ancient times, all the way to prehistoric age or ages – whose gloomy remains demonstrate, or at least suggest, the ancient foundations on which our people later resumed building further.” (Todor Manojlovic,1936)

After World War Two, in 1950, the Museum was granted the former Mortgage Bank's building, where it remained to this very day, and after a brief repair, opened for general public in 1952. The name of the museum was once again the National Museum. The National Museum has also grown thanks to its subsidiary museums: in 1973, the Gallery of Frescoes – specific museum which displays copies of wall paintings and decorative plastic of medieval Serbian monasteries; in 1975, the Museum of Vuk and Dositej, dedicated to two great Serbian educators and reformists of language, and the Memorial Museum of Nadezda and Rastko Petrovic, dedicated to two exceptional artist; in 1978, the Museum Lepenski Vir in Donji Milanovac – built at the most significant Mesolithic site in Europe; and in 1996, the Archeological Museum of Djerdap in Kladovo, which displays archeological riches of the Danube region. Overall, 160 years of activity resulted in over 1,400 exhibitions and over 500 publications, realized mostly since 1952.

The Museum's collections have over 400,000 most representative and superior archeological, historical and art works today – the most significant evidence for understanding of archeology and history of art, representing development and changes of civilization in the territory of today's Serbia and its immediate surroundings, from prehistoric times to late medieval period, as well as crucial artistic tendencies and styles, supreme artistic merits in national and European art, from medieval period to contemporary works. We would like to point out Lepenski Vir (7th millennium B.C.), the Vinca statues (6-5th millennium B.C.), the Dupljaja Chariot (16-13th century B.C.), golden masks from Trebeniste (6th century B.C.), household sets from Jabucje (1st century A.D.), the Belgrade Cameo (4th century), Miroslav's Gospel (12th century), King Radoslav's coins (13th century), medieval frescoes, bowl from Vracevsnica (17th century), paintings of Paja Jovanovic (19th century) or Sava Sumanovic (20th century), obtained mainly through excavation or as gifts from benefactors, who, in the long and rich history of the National Museum, came from the ranks of both rulers and, more often, common citizens. All of them contributed to the National Museum becoming a true symbol of the Serbian culture.

director,
dr Tatjana Cvjetićanin