See the real Zagreb on this city tour with street artists

Krešimir Golubić remembers his break into Zagreb’s street-art scene. He’d honed his craft in Berlin before returning to the capital in 1992. “We had the war. It was terrible. Everyone had guns and I had a spraycan. So I wrote ‘Who are you?’ in English next to my tag. A street artist wrote ‘Who are you?’ beside that, so we met. It was like Facebook on a wall.”

After an hour with Krešimir, one of Croatia’s leading street artists — a co-founder of the Zagreb Street Art Festival, who paints under the pseudonym Leon GSK — I’m starting to see Zagreb anew. Look beyond the handsome Austro-Hungarian architecture and the city’s streets are a lively conversation peppered with in-jokes and beauty.

On the central hub of Ban Jelačić Square, a man turns the handle of a barrel organ, surrounded by onlookers. Krešimir crosses instead to a scruffy corner of Tkalčićeva Street off the square. It has paste-up artworks of a strutting red fish and a girl with a mop of orange hair holding a spraycan. A stencilled girl throws a Molotov cocktail of love-hearts. A lamp-post is a kaleidoscope of multicoloured stickers. To insiders like Krešimir, such “interventions” are artists’ calling cards; the red fish is an icon of Italian artist Merioone, for example. That isn’t the point, though.

Now graffiti is hung in galleries, you forget its original power to express something about its community. Krešimir’s tour returns it to the wild where it belongs. It’s art as safari. “Street art is raw,” he says. “What you see in galleries doesn’t have the same energy of an intervention like this.” He’s pointing to a mayonnaise bottle stuck high up on a wall. It’s a reference to a concept artwork by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan that duct-taped a banana to a wall. “After we joined the euro [in 2023] prices went crazy. Everything was madness. This is the mayonnaise that became like art because of the cost. I really like this.”

Though official murals were painted in communist Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 70s, Zagreb was the first place in Eastern Europe to adopt the street-style graffiti of New York in 1983. Krešimir explains: “It has always been the most progressive city, economically and artistically.” But in 1980s Yugoslavia, the authorities hardly smiled on iconoclasts. Early sprayers risked a beating from police or jail. Now Zagreb is almost proud of its street artists.

We go down an alley, past a mosaic with ‘Nazovi svoju Mamu’ (Call your mother) set in damaged asphalt — the work of Frenchman Ememem — to find dancing skeletons, a masked girl with swirling hair, a delicately stencilled geisha and a cartoonish teenager in oversized trainers. This is Pri Nami garden bar, a semi-derelict courtyard that hosts the international Zagreb Street Art festival. Even while occupied by gen-Zers with laptops, the cafe has a countercultural cool distinct from surrounding streets.

Moving on, we head up Tkalčićeva Street, its pastel baroque houses now occupied by bars and cafes. The more I look, the more I see: a Warhol-esque Campbell soup tin labelled Media’s Fear Soup; a faded mural of a couple with turkey heads on craft brewery Medvedgrad, one of the first commercial works in the city; a ship whose wake trails across the pavement. There’s also a paste-up of inventor Nikola Tesla with a red mohican — one of Krešimir’s. “He was the first punk rocker, because of his avant garde ideas and way of thinking,” he explains.

We cut away up some steps and slip through an archway into Park Opatovina. It’s an oasis of sudden calm after the bar street — a long rectangle of grass and trees where old folk sit on sunny benches and young mums chat beside excited tots in a playground. And there’s street art. Beside a giant denim-clad Gulliver being roped by cartoon men who leap from a book, the park walls are painted with a lounge and a crazily tiled bathroom. Beneath it is written ‘Nekome je park doma’ (For some the park is home) — a comment on homelessness by Zagreb street artist Boris Bare.

Outside historic Lower Town, street art gives way to classic graffiti street-writing. At Pierottijeva Street, we slide open an industrial door sprayed ‘Medika’ and are hit by a blast of graffitied colour. A derelict former pharmaceutical factory, Medika is the wellspring of Zagreb street art, a cultural centre of galleries and grungy weekend clubs that’s non-profit and definitely non-governmental. Krešimir grows nostalgic: “This has a feeling of my teenage years. It’s punk energy. It’s a really important place for people who don’t fit into mainstream culture. Every weekend there’s something new.” It’s a renegade side to Zagreb that’s at odds with its historic looks. But perhaps it’s time to admire the city’s living history, too.