The Collection of Non-European Cultures of the Ethnographic Museum is unique in its size and quality in the Republic of Croatia. It contains around 3,500 objects that provide insight into different cultural phenomena, but also into changes in their understanding in the context of the development of ethnology as a science and the museum as an institution. The collection also provides information about individuals who collected objects from the mid-19th century until today, and whose interesting biographies tell a lot about the time in which they lived and worked. The objects in the Collection originate mostly from Africa, then Asia, Australia and Oceania, and South America. When the Ethnographic Museum was founded in 1919, many objects (1,321 inventory numbers) were inherited from the then National Museum. These include larger donations such as the Dragutin Lerman Collection from Congo and the Seljan Brothers Collection from Ethiopia and South America, as well as smaller donations. After the Museum was founded, the Collection was continuously replenished, mainly in the form of gifts, and to a lesser extent through acquisitions of individual objects or larger collections, such as donations from Milka Trnina and Katarina Carić.