- The Museum of Broken Relationships features random objects people saved from former loves, like a stiletto heel and a piece of belly-button lint.
- It's permanently located in Zagreb, Croatia, and also travels to cities around the world.
- The museum was founded by two exes who were struggling to divide their possessions after they broke up.
The Museum of Broken Relationships is designed to make you cry, laugh, scratch your head, gasp in outrage — essentially to feel all the feels.
Headquartered in Zagreb, Croatia, the museum is also a traveling exhibition that has popped up everywhere from New York City, to Tokyo, to Paris.
As novelist and essayist Leslie Jamison reported in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the museum was founded by Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić, who ended their romantic relationship with each other in 2003.
Flummoxed over how to divide their belongings, they wondered what it would be like to create an exhibit featuring items from breakups like theirs. The first version of that exhibition came to fruition three years later.
Today, the traveling exhibition continues to attract a steady stream of visitors, many of whom have shared snapshots of the items they saw — from the humorous (a stolen toaster) to the tragic (a juvenile court summons). Below, we've collected some of the most moving images from Instagram.
"I hate throwing perfectly functional items in landfills but would hate to see someone walking around in my once beautiful but now sadness infused dress."
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"A memento of my grandmother's great love, Karlo, who drowned in a river in 1920."
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"One day, as a gift, he gave me a phone with wires hanging from it. He had ripped it off of a payphone in Echo Park the night before. I was not there."
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See the rest of the story at Business Insider