Marija Šercer was born in 1933 in Zagreb; she went to elementary and high school in Subotica, and took a degree from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, having read history and art history. She worked as history teacher for a year in the Ivanec elementary school, and from 1959 was curator of the Museum of the Serbs in Croatia. When this museum was merged to the History Museum in 1963, she took over the job of curator in the new institution. Her mother was Hungarian, and Marija spoke this language very well, and received a six months scholarship to study in Hungary. From 1967 she ran the Weapons Collection in the CHM in Zagrebn. At first she studied the Desnica Arms Collection, which writer Vladan Desnica had sold to the CHM. She also studied the archival material of the correspondence of the Desnica family relating to the Bosnia and Herzegovina Insurrection of 1876. She inventoried and systematically studied the cold steel that she presented in the exhibitions Old Weapons on Poles, 1972; Yatagans, 1975; Swords, Daggers, Knives, 1977; Sabres, 1980.
In 1975 she took a master’s with a thesis on Artistically Decorated Cold Steel of the 17th and 18th centuries in the CHM. She put on several touring exhibitions at home and abroad. Catalogues accompanied all these exhibitions.
Particular attention was attracted by two exhibitions with fine catalogues: Old Zagreb Trades, 1991, and Emblems of Honour and Power in Croatia of the 19th century, 1994. An outstanding expert in cold steel, she helped many museums throughout Croatian in inventorying and in making new displays (in Slavonski Brod, Šibenik, Gornja Stubica, Sinju, Turopolje, Varaždin, Rijeka, Čazma, Ozalj and Pazin).
As well as catalogue texts, she published many scholarly articles in specialised journals at home and abroad, and often published museological articles in specialised periodicals, papers, as both author and as translator. She won the Plaque on the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of the Croatian National Museum in Zagreb.

NB. Data taken from the questionnaire, material taken from the Personnel Archives of the MDC, and from an interview recorded on February 28, 2002.