Ivan Matejčić

Ivan Matejčić was born in Pazin in 1950. He graduated in Art History from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb in 1973 and earned his doctorate there in 2007. Since 1977, he has worked as a conservator and art historian at the Regional Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments in Split. From 1982 to 1988, he served as one of the editors of the „Likovna Enciklopedija Jugoslavije“ at the Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography in Zagreb. He was the director of the Poreč Heritage Museum (1988–1991), Regional Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments in Rijeka (1991–2000), and head of the Conservation Department in Pula (2000–2008). Since 1997, he has lectured as an adjunct at the Faculty of Humanities in Rijeka and, in 2009, became a professor at the Academy of Applied Arts in Rijeka, where he retired in 2015 as an associate professor. He authored the study that led to the Euphrasian Basilica's inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1997. Matejčić has published around ten books, catalogs, and brochures, fifty scientific and professional articles, and several dozen encyclopedia entries. He is the editor and co-author of the book series The Artistic Heritage of Istrian Churches and Corpus of Early Medieval Sculpture, authoring two volumes within the series. Matejčić received the Vicko Andrić Award for his conservation research and presentation of the Carolingian architectural and artistic layers from the 8th and 9th centuries in Istria (2000), the European Union’s Europa Nostra Award for the restoration of the episcopal complex in Poreč and the establishment of the diocesan museum (2001), and the Radovan Ivančević Award from the Croatian Art Historians' Association (2006), among numerous local honors. The Assembly of the County of Istria has awarded him the Lifetime Achievement Award Krasna zemljo, which will be presented to him at the Istrian Parliament on December 11 of this year.