Nada Bezić in the Oda-birano radio series, Croatian Radio, First Programme, 2020/11/17

The premiere of the music documentary stories “Twenty meters of gramophone records – the collection of Ivan Mirnik” was presented in the radio feature Oda-birano, edited by Iva Lovrec-Štefanović. The radio feature revealed some interesting details about the rare collection of shellac records gathered by the eminent archaeologist Ivan Mirnik. Ivan Mirnik started collecting a large collection of shellac records (vinyl predecessor) in the late 1950s, just when they stopped being produced. He himself didn’t continue to count the records, so the collection is now estimated not by the number of records, but rather by meters of shelves. The collection, researched through a conversation with Mirnik by musicologist Nada Bezić, a collaborator on the project, offers rarities such as the oldest recording of composition in Zagreb dated back in 1902, and a short insert of the finale of the opera “Tosca” with an extremely rare recorded voice of Croatian primadonna, Milka Trnina. Ivan Mirnik digitized more than 1,600 of his shellac recording and made them available to the general public through a special YouTube channel.

Listen to the feature here.