Thanks to the collaboration between the City Museum of Rijeka and the Cres Museum, Rijeka hosts the exhibition of old postcards called Greetings from Cres. The Rijeka audience can see 200 postcards from the collection of Damir Kovač and the holdings of the Cres Museum.
They point us to the tourist development of the island, reminding us that the town of Cres accommodated its first tourists more than 170 years ago, followed by other island communities, yet much later. The exhibition is a kind of research of who and why visited the island in the first half of the 20th century, and how it was experienced by the first travellers and travel writers. The oldest kartulins in that part of the Kvarner region date from the 1890s, and most of them originated in the so-called golden age of postcards (until 1918), which means they offer the opportunity for the island places to be seen as they once were.
In order to achieve this purpose, ant to provide the Rijeka audience with as complete information as possible, two exhibitions are united under one name in the City Museum of Rijeka. These exhibitions are Greetings from Cres and Life before Tourism, which are similar in visual material, but differ thematically, and consequently complement each other. The first one refers to the town of Cres and includes 140 postcards, and the second to the towns of Beli, Osor, Orlec, Porozine, Martinšćica, Stivan, Belej, Valun, Lubenice and Vrana Lake, comprising 60 postcards.
