Importanne Center

Importanne d.o.o., founded by Ciril Zovko, opened Importanne Center in 1994 on Ante Starčević Square in Zagreb, between the city’s main railway station and Hotel Esplanade, becoming Croatia’s first modern shopping center. Construction during the war years of the early 1990s required excavating nearly 30 metres underground, a technological first in Croatia that later informed the engineering behind other Zagreb underground parking projects.

At roughly 31,000 sqm, the property carries more than 100 stores and food outlets connected via a renovated pedestrian underpass beneath the station’s platforms, a route the property’s own materials describe as exceptionally busy given its direct connection to Zagreb’s main railway station, giving the center genuinely unmatched foot traffic among Zagreb shopping destinations. Konzum anchors grocery, with Deichmann and Pepco among the value-fashion tenants alongside a dense cluster of jewelry, tobacco and travel-goods specialists.

A 500-space underground garage serves the property, and its location within Zagreb’s pedestrian-friendly, park-adjacent city core has made it a stop on several thematic tourist walking routes, distinct from Zagreb’s larger, car-oriented suburban malls.

That underground-excavation origin story, a retail center built by tunneling nearly 30 metres beneath an active, functioning railway station during wartime conditions, gave Importanne Center a genuinely unusual construction history among European shopping centers of its era, and established engineering precedents the city’s later underground parking projects would draw on directly.