Gjuro Szabo’s Old Zagreb offers a good deal of interesting information about the city’s growth between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Century.[1] However, the figures are strewn throughout the volume, and some of them are not in tune with each other.[2] It should also be noted that some of the figures are very precise, while most of them are rounded off, suggesting a guess rather than census data. Still, the assembled figures are of great value in the absence of better ones. All the population figures that can be found in the book are as follows:

1782 - 2,689
1800 - 7,000
1853 - 15,114
1857 - 16,657
1860 - 19,857
1863 - 20,000
1880 - 29,218
1886 - 34,000
1890 - 38,742
1900 - 57,000
1910 - 75,000
1918 - 80,000
1940 - 280,000

The figure for 1800 is actually mentioned in the text as pertaining to “the beginning of the Nineteenth Century.”[3] It is also worth noting that the figure for 1863 is only a guess, as Szabo comments that there were “at most” that many people in the city at the time.[4] Similarly, the figure for 1886 must also be a guess, as he comments that there were “at least” that many people this year.[5] Be that as it may, it is obvious that Zagreb has experienced two growth spurts, the first of which starts in 1860s or 1870s and ends with the beginning of World War I, while the second spans the period between World Wars I and II. As Szabo comments the second spurt, only every fortieth citizen of Zagreb in 1940 was actually born in the city.[6] Now, that is growth!

Addendum (November 25, 2015)

Today I searched the World Wide Web for information about the population of the Croatian capital in 1946, the year of my birth. The best I could find was a Wikipedia page about Zagreb with relevant census statistics.[7] In 1931, it had 185,581 inhabitants, and the number rose to 279,623 in 1948. Accordingly, there were about a quarter of a million inhabitants in the city when I was born, which would be about a quarter of its present size. One way or another, I was born in a provincial city.

Footnotes

1. Zagreb: Vasić and Horvat, 1941.

2. In particular, they appear on pp. 71, 140, 157, 165, 195, 227, 270, and 280. The figures for 1880, 1890, and 1990 appear on pp. 195 and 270, but the former offer greater precision than the latter, which are rounded off. More important, the figure for 1880 is 28,268 on p. 165 and 29, 218 on p. 195, of which the higher figure is shown in the listing below.

3. Op. cit., p. 280.

4. Op. cit., p. 157.

5. Op. cit., p. 227.

6. Op. cit., p. 280.

7. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagreb (accessed on November 25, 2015).