Why dr. Danica Pinterović is the most significant cultural worker from Osijek

Dr. Danica Pinterović dedicated her whole sixty-six-year long career to her hometown of Osijek. When she started working in the Museum of Slavonia in 1941, she became dr. Josip Bösendorfer’s right hand in everyday museum work and in the field. In 1945 and 1946, dr. Pinterović was a member of the Committee for the Collection and Preservation of Cultural Monuments and Antiquities (KOMZA) in Socialist Republic of Croatia, which recorded and salvaged the endangered cultural and historical material from Osijek and Slavonian castles. Dr. Pinterović started systematically writing Work Diaries, in which we can find an abundance of data related to everyday work of the Museum, but also the events in the city, museum exhibitions, visits, fieldwork, and research. She also arranged the first permanent exhibitions of certain Museum departments and initiated their foundation by working on the materials. In 1948, dr. Pinterović became the honorary conservator of Osijek city and district, and her great contribution to the preservation of cultural heritage of Osijek became obvious in the making of the first Ordinance on the Preservation of Antiquities of the City of Osijek after the War. She became the director of the Museum of Slavonia in 1949, as the first woman in the history of the Museum in that position. During her term, the number of curators systematically grew, which led to higher staff specialization and a growing number of professional and scientific papers. At first, her areas of interest were ethnology and arts and crafts, but after 1953, she became almost fully dedicated to archaeology. For a long period, she was committed to maintaining the relationships with national and international experts from various areas, with whom she exchanged professional information, literature, arranged meetings and social gatherings, and went to scientific conferences. We can see how engaged she was in the museum work from her numerous memberships in different societies in Croatia and abroad. After she retired in 1961, dr. Pinterović continued to actively pursue scientific work as a freelance research associate in the Museum, the position she held until 1974. Since she was an established expert for Roman provincial archaeology, the Interacademic Committee assigned her the role of the leader of the Croatian limes research, of an associate for drafting Tabula Imperii Romani and for studying epigraphs from Slavonia and Baranya area. In cooperation with an American team of archaeologists, led by dr. Stephan Foltiny, she was the leader of archaeological excavation team in Batina. When Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts opened the Center for Scientific and Artistic Work in Osijek in 1974, dr. Pinterović became their external research associate and remained in that position until 1985. Under the auspices of the Institute, dr. Pinterović published her most important work, Mursa i njeno područje u antičko doba (Mursa and Its Surroundings in the Time of Antiquity) in 1978. This work was the crown of her long and fruitful career. The same year, dr. Pinterović received the highest state award – the State Award for Scientific Research in the Field of Archaeology, Ethnography and Museology (Lifetime Achievement Award). Apart from that award, the most significant one for her work, dr. Pinterović received numerous other awards. Her name is a constant in professional and scientific circles, not only in Osijek, since Mursa i njeno područje u antičko doba is still the most often cited work in scientific papers about the Roman town of Mursa, and it is still a piece of literature used in universities. Dr. Danica Pinterović, with her dedicated and systematic work and, above all, her organizational skills in museum collections processing and constituting, laid the foundations of today’s work of the Museum of Slavonia, the largest complex museum in the Republic of Croatia