Before it was unified, Zagreb's upper town (Gornji Grad) consisted of two rival districts which took great pleasure in knocking chunks out of each other at every opportunity - not really surprising, as Kaptol was home to the Bishop and all his riches while Gradec was where you'd find the tradesmen and workers who made the city tick. It was very much a "them and us" deal in medieval Zagreb, until the late 18th century when somebody finally decided that it might be quite a nice idea if everyone stopped being a d*** to each other and tried to get along - and Gornji Grad was born. I may have simplified that slightly.

I entered the upper town today through the Stone Gate, the last of the original five entrances to Gradec to remain following a great fire in 1731 which burnt the district to the ground. Today, the Stone Gate is not only a dramatic way to enter the upper town, passing through its imposing twin arches, but the connecting vaulted chamber is home to a painting of Mary and Jesus which is believed by locals to be sacred. So the story goes, the painting was miraculously saved from the fire by divine intervention, and visitors are asked to remain silent as they pass through the shrine between the gates, where pilgrims light candles to the Virgin Mary and it is said that your wishes will come true. I'm not quite sure when Jesus' mum decided to branch out and start a wish granting service, but we won't go there.

Gornji Grad is a beautiful place to wander around at any time - very much a monument to medieval Zagreb - and never seems crowded even with the market only a short distance away. Just a few steps from the Stone Gate, you'll find St Mark's Square and at its centre the extraordinary Church of St Mark, one of the most imposing gothic churches I have ever seen - not because of the gothic architecture but because of the roof, which has been carefully tiled with an elaborate colourful depiction of the Zegreb coat of arms and that of the Kingdom of Croatia. Unfortunately - and I know you're going to agree with me just as soon as you've finished punching "St Mark's Church, Zagreb" into your favourite search engine and looking over the photographs - it does rather look as though a particularly talented football hooligan has got up at midnight every day for several years in order to carefully paint the shields of his favourite club on the roof, which is a shame. The trouble is that once you've made that connection, you really can't get it out of your head - so however impressive the architecture and workmanship of St Mark's Church might be, I really can't get past the idea that it's actually a really massive and particularly gothic football museum. Sorry about that.

One of the more unusual attractions in the upper town, situated on a quiet street whose name I can't pronounce to the south of St Mark's Church, is the bizarrely named "Museum of Broken Relationships", a repository of trinkets left there by people wishing to commemorate or, more often than not, embarrass former lovers. As I entered, the young lady behind the ticket counter beamed brightly at me and asked: "Just a ticket for one today, Sir?" - but apparently she didn't find anything remotely ironic about this, her smile faltering only slightly when I burst into spontaneous laughter. Luckily, she didn't throw me out on the street, which would only have added to the irony.

The museum was created in 2006 by Zagreb artists Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić after their own relationship came to an end and they joked between themselves of starting a museum to house stuff they didn't want any more. They began asking friends to donate memories and then began travelling the world, collecting anything they found funny, poignant or tragic. To all intents and purposes, it seems that their lives became a hell of a lot more interesting after they separated than while they were together. Finally, in 2010, the museum returned home and took up permanent residence in Zagreb's upper town after attempts to interest the Ministry of Culture failed and the couple were forced to invest their own money into finding the museum a permanent home. The museum of Broken relationships became the city's first privately owned museum, and the only one to open seven days a week - which is quite handy if you arrive on a Sunday.

Exhibits at the museum range from the sublimely funny - a pair of fake breasts given as a present to a lady who, shall we say, did not quite come up to the standards of her other half - to the heartrendingly sad, such as "my mother's suicide note" and the bottle of tears collected by a spurned girlfriend. Expect to come out feeling shattered - if you're expecting to find a light hearted museum in which you can spend the day engaging in a little schadenfreude and roaring with laughter at the misfortune of others, you may be surprised to find that not everything about the museum is quite as clear cut as you might expect. Take, for example, the unassuming key shaped bottle opener you come across as you wander from room to room, reading the little messages attached to the exhibits by their previous owners: "You talked to me of love, gave me small gifts every day. This is one of them - the key to your heart. You turned my head, you just did not want to sleep with me. I realised how much you loved me only after you died of AIDS."

In the gift shop before you leave, make sure to grab yourself a "bad memories eraser", a two ended pencil designed to be snapped in half during moments of frustration, or an "I love breakups" T-Shirt to freak your partner out with when you return home - and don't forget to take lots of photographs, because nobody in their right mind is going to believe you when you say that you visited the museum of getting dumped.

Anyway, I could go on about the upper town all day and still have more to tell - but this is a blog and not a travel guide, and I'd rather like some of you to reach the next post without needing to be resuscitated having died of boredom. Sometimes, you just need to experience somewhere for yourself, and I'm sure you'll thank me later for leaving you something to discover for yourself. Besides, I have to be up early in the morning to catch a train to Slovenia, and when you're in a foreign country and relying on an unfamiliar public transport network to get you around, it doesn't pay to stay up late reminiscing about football churches.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.