Public library of HNŽ Mostar

About the institution:

The National Library of HNŽ, Mostar, from its establishment in February 1946, until today, has written a very interesting and rich seventy-five-year history, going through various difficulties, because the book in our region has always been on the margins of social events.

National Library of HNŽ, Mostar as the parent library, carries out its main activity, such as professional supervision of school, public and national libraries, improvement of professional work in libraries based on the principles of modern library theory and practice, and for the sake of the highest quality performance of library activities, and performs its core activity, procurement, processing, storage and making library materials available for use.

 The library was initially located on the first floor of the Jagnje restaurant. In 1950, the library was moved to Lenin's Promenade, to the first floor of the house of Mujaga Komadine, the former mayor of Mostar at the beginning of the 20th century. With the increase of the Library's fund in 1959, the Library moved into the premises of the House of Culture in Rondo. When it moved in, the Library had 40,000 books.

It is interesting that at the end of the 1960s, our Library established a bibliobus service, which at the beginning of 1970 had over 3,800 books in its collection. A van equipped with 2,000 books was purchased, intended for the population of the rural areas of the municipality of Mostar.
In 1955, the book fund amounted to 17,852 copies, and in 1965, 88,250 books.
In the golden years of the library, it was crowned with several awards, February 14 and the Order of Merit, in 1981 it was declared the best library in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in the same year it was named after Đura Pucar-Star. At the beginning of the library's operation, many books were removed due to political reasons after the Second World War, and during the Homeland War, only part of the books from the rich fund were saved, i.e. the pre-war fund of 218,000 books, after the war it was drastically reduced and 102,000 books were saved . The library is still recovering, but it is on the right track and recently some of its departments have been renovated.