POSTAGE STAMP DAY - CENTENARY OF THE POST OFFICE BUILDING IN ZAGREB

Motif: Post Office Building in Zagreb, 1904 The Zagreb Post Office palace, built in the course of the years 1903 and 1904, marks its centenary anniversary this year. The Post Office started its work on September 12, 1904, and it is this date that is referred to as the official start of its functioning. In the same year the new telephone exchange was opened, with 1200 subscribers and the capacity of 2000 connections. The construction of the new Post Office palace added an architectural dominant to the Jurišićeva Street, preserved up to the present. Like numerous buildings in the Lower Town of Zagreb, nowadays it is a protected cultural monument. The building was erected on a building site of 3950 square meters that occupies the area in Jurišićeva Street, formerly called Puževa Street, and in Palmotićeva and Kurelčeva street (the latter formerly called Ružična Street. The building itself covers an area of 2500 square meters. The project of the building in the Hungarian Secession style was designed by the Hungarian architects Erno Foerk and Gyula Sandi, who took into account the utilization of building materials and structures with high resistance to temporal conditions. The project itself was originally conceived as a relatively low two storey building, 82 meters in length, built with red brick and horizontal stone cornices, with the roof truss realized with the characteristic silhouette with turrets that should have been the final girders of the air line. The combination of the stone ground-floor, with the brick decoration in the garret and the second floor parapet and on the slopes of the triangular gables and with the horizontal stone cornices, all these elements resulted in a composition that should have basically emphasized all the attributions of post. The building had three entrances that functionally divided the spaces offered to the users’ disposal, and they led to the luxuriantly decorated interiors and great halls with natural light coming through the glass roof, and the central staircase leading to the upper floors. On one side there were counters for letters, on the other counters for parcels, while special space was provided for telephone booths. The premises for technical services were on the second floor: the 44 meters’ long telegraph switchboard and the 17 meters’ long telephone switchboard. The construction work was performed jointly by craftsmen from Zagreb and Hungary. The Zagreb craftsmen undertook the completion of excavations, masonry, carpentry, stonemasonry, plumbing, lock-smithing, house-and-wood painting and roofing work, while the Hungarian contractors undertook execution of the iron constructions, waterworks, drainage, heating, joinery and floor-tiling works. The building has undergone several reconstructions. In 1930 the third floor was added and the turrets were removed with the result of freeing the heavy roof from elements of Hungarian style. At the end of the year 1925, when preparations for mounting of the automatic telephone switchboard with 10,000 subscribers were under way, another wing to the building, a three-storey courtyard wing was also begun, and was completed in 1926. In the meantime a private house adjoining the old Post Office building was bought in Palmotićeva Street. The preparations for the exchange of the turreted roof lasted up to the year 1930. The aesthetic image of the building was not disturbed; on the contrary, by removing the visually heavy dominants of the roof, the building had received more urban proportions and thus achieved a higher quality of interpolation into the environment built meanwhile round it. The adaptation from the year 1958 was significantly more aggressive, with the result that the openness of the palace was essentially reduced by closing the lateral entrances and the concentration was centred on the basic axis. Both lateral doors, executed in styled wrought iron, were walled up though, with the identical central entrance, they used to give the main façade a special appearance. After the reconstruction it was only the main entrance on No. 13 that remained, though it also underwent changes. The triangular stone crossbar that fitted the façade gable triangle on the roof cornice of the roof axis was also removed. The same intervention accounted for the covering up of the representative columns in the halls, while the arches, originally decorated by hand-made majolica, were completely covered and remained so until the latest adaptation of the left great hall which was executed to the project designed by architect Nenad Kondža in 2001. This adaptation, by dismantling the wall facing, uncovered part of the luxurious historic interior, the column capitals with the Croatian historic coat of arms, as well as the arches that had been hidden from view for almost half a century, while vaults in the part circumferential to the glass loft lights, as well as those in the main entrance zone are still waiting to come to light. The Post Office palace is part of the Secession itinerary in Croatia, and its undoubted architectural quality will definitely secure for it a special place and significance in Croatian architecture.