Veliki Grđevac

About 25 kilometres southeast of Bjelovar, Veliki Grđevac has turned the home landscape of children’s author Mato Lovrak into an unusually tangible literary destination. Lovrak was born here on 8 March 1899 and later returned to teach at the village school from 1922 to 1926. The principal sight is the Lovrak Centre beside the Grđevica stream, where a museum train evokes A Train in the Snow and a reconstructed mill recalls Pero Kvržica’s Gang; the complex also includes a miller’s house and ethnographic displays. A roughly 600-metre Friends of Nature Trail, opened in 2022, leads from the centre through woodland past interpretation panels to a viewpoint. Lovrak’s memorial room in the local school adds the writer’s biography to the scenes recreated from his best-known books. The experience is therefore more than a collection of literary props: the train, mill, forest and school show how this Bilogora village and Lovrak’s years as a teacher shaped his stories. Visits to the centre and its collections should be arranged at least two days ahead.

Veliki Grđevac draws its identity from Mato Lovrak and the “Great Village” of his fiction. Born here in 1899, Lovrak published A Train in the Snow and Pero Kvržica’s Gang in 1933; their imagery now has a physical counterpart in the village’s train, mill and child-centred interpretation. The settlement stands near the Česma River in the Bilogora foothills, about 25 kilometres from Bjelovar. The Grđevica stream and the woodland surrounding the Lovrak Centre are not merely scenery, as an interpretation trail uses them to connect the books with their local environment. A memorial room inside Mato Lovrak Primary School completes the portrait of the author, who taught in Veliki Grđevac from 1922 to 1926.