What happened
The Golden Barrel opened near Terazije in 1866, and the barrel was not a figure of speech: the first house was a single storey with a small cask set into the front of it. That building came down at the end of the 1920s and a larger block went up, part of which still stands, and the wooden barrel moved inside. The kafana kept brick walls, dark wood and checked cloths, and it kept a reputation as a recruiting room — chroniclers have volunteers for the Serbian-Ottoman and Balkan wars gathering there, and the young Gavrilo Princip is said to have come with friends from Mlada Bosna. Scenes from a well-known Yugoslav comedy were filmed in it. On Monday 9 May 2022 the last guests were seen out around eight in the evening and the padlock went on the door as it did every night. This time it stayed on, under a notice saying the premises were being prepared. A fortnight later a reporter found the telephone unanswered and a shop assistant over the road who said nobody had come at all, not even builders.
What is there now
An empty room behind a locked door in Prizrenska. OpenStreetMap still holds the kafana at the same point, tagged as a disused restaurant on a survey made on 14 May 2025, three years after the padlock went on, and no new business at the address was traced on 20 September 2026. The notice about premises being prepared remains the last public word from whoever holds the lease.
Location recorded from OpenStreetMap node 3966915785, Prizrenska, Stari Grad — OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), read 20 September 2026 (https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3966915785).
Sources
- nova.rs
- espreso.co.rs
- Wikipediasr.wikipedia.org
- openstreetmap.org
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