The Museum of Apoxyomenos

Despite sitting in a Pula-themed batch, the Museum of Apoxyomenos has nothing to do with Pula — it's on the island of Lošinj, in the town of Mali Lošinj, roughly 100 kilometres up the coast in the Kvarner Gulf.

The statue itself was found by chance: in 1996, a Belgian tourist diving near the islet of Vele Orjule spotted a bronze figure on the seabed at a depth of around 45 metres. The find was reported to Croatian authorities in 1998, and a dive team recovered the statue in April 1999. It turned out to be a Greco-Roman bronze of a young athlete, dated to the 2nd or 1st century BC and known as the Apoxyomenos — Greek for someone scraping oil and sweat from their skin with a strigil after exercise. It's one of only a handful of such bronzes to survive anywhere, and among the best preserved.

Restoration took the Croatian Restoration Institute in Zagreb about six years, using only mechanical tools rather than chemicals to strip away marine growth — conservators reportedly found wood fragments, seeds and even the remains of a small rodent lodged inside the hollow bronze, presumably from long before it ended up underwater. The project later won the Europa Nostra prize for cultural heritage conservation, and the statue toured major museums, including the Louvre, the British Museum and the Getty, before returning home.

It found a permanent home in May 2016, inside the historic Kvarner Palace in the centre of Mali Lošinj, redesigned by architects Idis Turato and Saša Randić specifically to house it — a sequence of themed rooms leads visitors from the story of its discovery through to a final, deliberately bare white room where the statue stands alone. It's a small museum built around a single object, but the object and its backstory carry it.

Mali Lošinj gets a brief mention elsewhere on this site, but the museum earns the trip on its own — a logical detour for anyone chartering a gulet in Croatia and looking to add a bit of ancient history to a Kvarner itinerary.