A foreigner who visits Croatia and is interested in its cultural heritage will discover two fundamental and contradictory truths: first, that Croatian art is virtually unknown in Europe and in the world, and, second, although a small country, it is proportionally very rich in works of art and architecture that are architecturally of the highest level in European artistic achievement.

The problem of recognizing Croatian cultural heritage and its place in European art history has been aggravated by the fact that, up till recently, this valuable heritage was concealed under the collective name of "Yugoslav" culture. Even then, the few foreigners who knew something about the culture of the area, primarily having traveled through the cities of the East Adriatic coast and some of the thousand of islands of the Croatian archipelago, were not aware that this region, comprising the most prominent cultural focal points of the East Adriatic, was in fact Croatian, from Umag, Buje or Novigrad in the north of the Istrian penninsula, to the island of Lokrum, and Cavtat or Konavle, in the southernmost parts of Dalmatia.