The Pula Film Festival, held every summer in the Pula Arena, was launched in 1954 and is one of the oldest film festivals in the world. Croatian cinemas hosted more than 4 million viewers in 2012.

About 60% of the population live in urban centres, and one in four live in one of the four largest cities (Zagreb, Split, Rijeka, Osijek).

The Croats put the Glagolitic script into print in the very earliest period of European printing, in the 15th century, and five incunabula were printed in Glagolitic. The incunabulum, Glagolitic Missal, was published on 22 February 1483, in Croatian Church Slavonic, only 28 years after Gutenberg’s Bible. It is the first ever missal in Europe to have been printed in a non-Latin script, and the perfection of the letters and the beauty of the typesetting and printing make it an absolute masterpiece of the printer’s art.

Grassalkovich Palace in Bratislava, today the residence of the president of Slovakia, was built in 1760 for Count Antal Grassalkovich, a Croatian noble serving as the head of the Hungarian Chamber. This palace is the largest and most important Baroque building in Slovakia.

Kornati National Park (1980), south of Šibenik and Zadar, encompasses an archipelago of about one hundred islands and islets. Enchanted by the beauty of its landscape, the Nobel laureate George Bernard Shaw wrote: 'On the last day of the Creation, God desired to crown His work and thus created Kornati Islands out of tears, stars and breath'.

Literature

Croatian medieval literature, unique in being produced in three languages (Latin, Old Slavonic and the vernacular) and three scripts (Roman, Glagolitic and Cyrillic) developed from the 8th to 16th century in the form of poetry, verse dialogue ...

Gastronomy

The main feature of Croatian cuisine is its diversity, so it is impossible to single out a typical cuisine or typical dish. Different natural and economic circumstances and diverse cultural influences have affected the development of several ...

Geo-Communication position

As an Adriatic, Central European country, and part of the Danube valley, Croatia enjoys a favourable geo-communication position. Thus several pan-European transport corridors and their branches pass through Croatia ...

Counties

The basic units of regional self-government are the counties (županija in Croatian). The present administrative territorial division of the country was introduced in 1997, when the 1992 division was changed. Smaller administrative territorial units within counties ...

Language

The Croatian language belongs to the South Slavic group of languages. It is the official language of the Republic of Croatia, and is also spoken by Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia (Vojvodina), Montenegro (Bay of Kotor), Austria ...

Executive power

The President of the Republic represents and acts for the Republic of Croatia at home and abroad. The President is elected pursuant to universal and equal suffrage by direct election for a period of five years. The President of the Republic provides ...

The Constitution

The Croatian Parliament adopted the Constitution of the Republic of Croatia on 22 December 1990. It is popularly known as the ‘Christmas Constitution’. Parliament adopted amendments to the Constitution in 1997, 2000, 2001 and 2010. The Constitution of the Republic ...

Croatia in brief

Croatia has been present on the contemporary international political stage since its independence from the Yugoslav Federation, i.e. for a little over two decades, but in terms of history and culture, is one of the oldest European countries ...