It was on 1st September 1821, when the Rijeka entrepreneur Andrija Ljudevit Adamić bought the mill in the Rječina canyon with the intention of starting paper production. Two hundred years later, on 16th September 2021, the exhibition “The Hartera Paper Mill Without Paper” was opened in the City Museum, which reconstructs the biography of the Rijeka Paper Mill, of which Adamić’s mill was the embryo. The author of the exhibition, Kristina Pandža, conceived the exhibition as a walk through all of the chapters of the Mill’s history, until its disappearance in the wasteland of the Croatian economic reality of the 1990s. The emphasis is placed on four themes: the administration, technology, workers and the products. A large part of the visitors at the opening were especially interested the Mill’s workers. To some degree, this was expected, if we realise that many of the Mill’s workers are still amongst us, and their personal experiences are increasingly recognised as unique memorial material for which the exhibition can be an incentive to pull out things from family archives and museum storage. This is because all of Rijeka’s historical economic stories have their own personal, subjective dimension, which in many ways can be as equally important as official documents about the work of company, with data about procurement, processing, production, profits, changes in ownership, market trends and so on.
In addition to the author of the exhibition, the visitors were addressed at the opening by the Deputy Mayor Sandra Krpan and Ervin Dubrović, the Museum’s director. The exhibition is open from 16th September until 18th November 2021.
