Blog

The Poglej! association awarded the Museum of Madness with the 2024 Renate Ažman Award for outstanding achievements in the field of mental health. The award ceremony took place in Ljubljana on 14 February 2025.

The following text is published as a foreword in the book Home of the Mentally Defective Trate issued by the Museum of Madness in 2024. Since the book is so far available only in Slovenian, we invite the non-Slovenian speaking readers to read the foreword, which was originally written in English.  

In this book, Sonja Bezjak presents the life and work in the former Home for the Mentally Defective and later the Institute for the Mentally and Nervously Ill, which operated in the Cmurek Castle in Trate. The foreword was written by Prosper Wanner, a member of the European network of the Faro Convention, and the introductory thoughts by Darja Farasin, co-founder of the Museum of Madness.

On Human Rights Day, the Museum of Madness calls for the respect of human rights for those residing in long-term care institutions.

On August 31, 2024, Act 1 of Musicville - Green European Opera: The Nude Stories, took place in the courtyard of Cmurek Castle.

We invite you to Cmurek Castle for an unforgettable late summer evening. In the shelter of the castle walls, in one of the most beautiful Renaissance courtyards in Slovenia, a tasting of excellent wines from selected winemakers of Štajerska region will take place. We will enrich the event with an interesting cultural program.

Igor Sapač's book on Cmurek Castle explores one of the oldest surviving medieval castles in Slovenia.

Simon Chang is a photographer who started photographing patients in psychiatric institutions in 2004 in Prague, where he photographed the Bohnice institution for several years. Between 2018 and 2019, he photographed the Hawler Psychiatric Hospital in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, whose cells are mainly filled with patients suffering from the effects of the recent war devastation. This time, the series of photographs is presented in Cmurek Castle, which operated as a State Asylum for the Mentally and Neurologically Ill between 1956 and 2004.

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Museum of Madness, we hosted two events on June 24, 2023 at Cmurek Castle in Trate. The talks aimed at reflecting on the challenges and importance of preserving and revitalizing cultural heritage. Recordings of the talks can now be viewed on our YouTube channel.

You are kindly invited to attend the two-day art embroidery workshop at the Museum of Madness Trate on Monday and Tuesday, 18 and 19 September, under the guidance of Saša Bezjak, painter, pedagogue and all-round artist. The workshop is organised in the framework of the European project EMPACT. In EMPACT we’ve set out to tackle the themes of empathy and sustainability and the relationship between them under the slogan "The art of thinking like a mountain".