Memorial Museum of Ivo Andrić

The Memorial Museum of Ivo Andrić was opened to public in 1976 at the apartment in Andrićev Venac, in which the writer and his wife Milica Babić, costume designer at the National Theatre in Belgrade, had lived since 1958. The entrance hall, drawing room and Ivo Andrić’s study have preserved their authentic appearance. The remaining rooms in the apartment were adapted to house the permanent exhibition of the Memorial Museum, which chronologically presents the life and work of this Nobel laureate.

Ivo Andrić’s study has preserved its original appearance and bears the authentic imprint of its owner, who found peace, privacy and silence in it. A porcelain figurine of Omer-Pasha Latas, bought by Andrić at some Viennese antique shop, can be seen on the writer’s sécretaire. It symbolically recalls the eponymous, anthological, posthumously published novella.

The interior of the drawing room reveals the sophisticated taste and nobleness of Ivo Andrić and Milica Babić, whose lives were dedicated to art. Over years, their drawing room was a meeting place for prominent artistic figures from Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Sarajevo, etc.

Paintings, watercolours and drawings exhibited in the drawing room are a part of a rich art collection preserved among Andrić’s belongings. Among the authors we find the names of the greatest 20th-centuryYugoslav and Serbian painters such as Petar Lubarda, Peđa Milosavljević, Milo Milunović, Ignjat Job, Stojan Aralica, Nedeljko Gvozdenović and Vojislav Stanić.

Ivo Andrić (Travnik, 1892 – Belgrade, 1975) was brought up in Višegrad and educated in Sarajevo, Zagreb, Vienna, Krakow. As a member of youth organization Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia), he was incarcerated in Austrian prisons. In 1919, he became a citizen of Belgrade and entered the diplomatic service, in which he remained until World War II broke out. In the meantime, in 1924, he took the PhD degree at the University of Graz by defending a thesis in philosophical sciences.

He is the author of several significant novels, numerous pieces of storytelling and lyrical and philosophical poetry, essays and criticism. In 1961, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His greatest novels (The Bridge on the Drina, The Woman from Sarajevo and Bosnian Chronicle) were written in Belgrade during the Nazi occupation 1941–1945.

The permanent exhibition gives a summarized overview of the life and literary work of Ivo Andrić – a diplomat and a writer. Photographs, documents, manuscripts, correspondence and books mark important dates and events, providing, at the same time, a valuable depiction of his contemporaries – writers, artists, politicians, journalists and friends.

The largest part of the study is occupied by the library with 3,502 bibliographic units, among which are volumes of dictionaries and lexicons, books in the field of history, domestic literature of the 19th century, Collected works of Goethe and Balzac, monographs in the field of history of art. The library has the status of a cultural asset under the protection of the National Library of Serbia.

The hidden ambience of the study was Andrić's space for reading and creating. In the study of the writer, winner of the Nobel Prize, the main exhibits are his writing desk and writing utensils, which with their simplicity and conciseness resemble Andrić himself.

Fragments of the manuscripts of Andrić's novels: "The Bridge on the Drina","Travnik Chronicles" and "The Woman from Sarajevo ", (completed in 1943, published in 1945) and "Omer Pasha Latas" (posthumously published in 1976). In more than 70 years since the publication of Andrić's most important novels and short stories, they have been translated worldwide into more than 45 languages, and Andrić is still at the top of the Nobel Prize-winning literary classics.

A small figure of Omer Pasha Latas, Andrić bought for himself in one of the Viennese antique shops. It is a metaphor for literary characters from Andrić's prose, who outlived both the writer and the work, and whose artistic characterization has historical-mythical features in real time in the history of Bosnia during the Ottoman Empire.

In the central, open space of the exhibition, Andrić's ceremonial diplomatic uniform with gold embroidery, a hat with feathers and a sword in a richly decorated cane, as well as a diplomatic suitcase with wooden and leather reinforcements, a witness to the diplomat's trip to European capitals and his return to Belgrade.