Osijek’s 19th century calendars from the Calendars collection of the Museum of Slavonia

The calendar collection is a valuable collection that includes calendars dating from the 18th century to the 21st century. Namely, calendars appeared at the end of the 18th century and their popularity and reach were at the highest in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, which is also the case with homeland calendars from Osijek, and in this paper we placed specific emphasis on the calendars in the Croatian language, printed in Osijek in the 19th century, i.e. the oldest Croatian calendars from Osijek in the Collection. Through library information used for cataloguing serial and monograph publications, as well as additional museological information and the inspection of the content of the calendars, four titles of the homeland calendars from the Collection have been analysed – Novi i stari kalendar slavonski (New and Old Slavonian Calendar), Narodna knjiga koledar (Folk Book Calendar), Hrvatski pravnički koledar (Croatian Legal Calendar) and Godišnjak Slavonskoga gospodarskoga društva (Yearly Calendar of the Slavonian Economy Society). The Calendars Collection in general, and especially these four titles, is very valuable, for example, for libraries, museums, homeland, literature, language, culture and history (especially of the City of Osijek, Slavonia and Baranja), and others. Considering that calendars were limited-use books and their usefulness ended at the start of the next calendar year, they have not been entirely preserved until now. That is why these preserved copies are extremely valuable to us, especially if we know that the oldest calendars had the role of newspapers, or they were designed to provide the necessary information for every day in the year, and they also helped with increasing the literacy level and raising the level of culture in Osijek after it was liberated from the Ottoman Turks. It is evident from just the titles of these four analysed calendars that the calendars developed through time, from those designed to teach or educate the lower classes, through those designed for a more educated audience, to specialized calendars, which also speaks about the development of Osijek, but also calendars in general - from shorter ones with less content from the early 19th century, to the more comprehensive ones from the late 19th century, the change and progress was matched by the readers who adapted to the development. Calendars published in the Croatian language were, regardless of the changes in content and style, the favourite reading material in continental Croatia. The inclusion of all the previously mentioned titles in the Osječka bibliografija (Bibliography of Osijek) by Marija Malbaša speaks plenty about their importance for the historical and modern reality of the local community, or their contribution to the collected works of the local printers, which is actually the basis for the history of printing and literature. Calendars are real proof that content printed as part of limited-use items which loses its importance in the following year will become very significant for various researches in the future, where every individual copy of the calendar represents a document from a certain period, a unique example of homeland source material and a primary source of research