The International Research Centre for Late Antiquity and Middle Ages – IRCLAMA (Međunarodni istraživački centar za kasnu antiku i srednji vijek – MICKAS) was founded in 1993 in Motovun, Croatia as a research centre of the University of Zagreb with two objectives: first, to present older Croatian heritage, until then relatively unknown in Europe and the rest of the world, to experts and broader public, and second, to make the Centre one of Europe’s central locations for research and scholarly activities by supporting large-scale international projects to be realized in Croatia bringing together the most renowned experts from all over the world. The Centre’s organizational structure comprises the Director and the Scientific Council who develop the Centre’s program, its scholarly, research and publishing activities.
One of the guiding ideas was that the Centre’s activities cover a wide area of research in order to include the greatest possible number of experts of different profiles and interests. Thus, the Centre is not specialized in studying one exclusive segment of older Croatian heritage, but it focuses on a broader time period ranging from the 4th until the 15th century and tries to employ a multidisciplinary approach which allows experts of different profiles (archaeologists, art historians, architects, museologists, conservators, antique law experts, liturgists, philosophers, historians of literature, anthropologists, sociologists, etc.) to participate in the Centre’s work. In addition, IRCLAMA is not limited to studying Croatian cultural heritage exclusively, but it tries to incorporate and contextualize it within the framework of the European and world cultural heritage. This aspect of the Centre’s work greatly benefits from cooperating with experts from all over the world.