5 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026
The short answer
By claim, the oldest pub in Czechia is Jaškovská krčma beside the Těrlicko reservoir in Czech Silesia, which cites a first written mention dated 12 May 1268 and holds a place in the Czech Book of Records. By evidence the answer is a different house in Prague: U Medvídků, whose written record begins in 1404 and whose brewery was founded by Jan Nedwídek in 1466. The Silesian tavern burned in 1682 and was rebuilt in 1691, so continuous trade from 1268 has never been shown.
Czech records are unusually good, and unusually specific about the wrong thing. From the fourteenth century onward the town books of Bohemia and Moravia recorded who owned which burgher house and which of those houses carried the right to brew, so a Prague pub can often be traced through five centuries of property transactions without a single mention of anybody being served a drink. That is why the dates on this page attach to houses and brewing rights rather than to licences: 1404 for the house at U Medvídků, 1466 for its brewery, 1499 for brewing at U Fleků. The twentieth century then interrupted nearly everything. Small-scale brewing largely stopped — U Medvídků's own brewhouse closed in 1898 — the trade was nationalised after 1948, and house brewing returned only after 1989. What survived all of it was the pivnice itself: the long-tabled beer hall where the beer comes in one variety, the waiter keeps a tally on a paper slip, and nobody asks what you would like.
Read the Czech evidence closely and you find three different things being dated, often in the same sentence. The house is dated by the town book. The brewery is dated by a grant or a purchase. The pub, the actual business of serving beer to strangers, is usually dated last and least well. U Medvídků has all three, which is why it grades highest: a Gothic core with thirteenth-century archaeology beneath it, records from 1404, a brewery from 1466, and a working microbrewery again today making X-Beer 33. U Fleků has the brewery and the continuity but not the early tavern record. Jaškovská krčma has the earliest mention of all and the largest gap in the middle.
All three Prague contenders are within a short walk of one another, and they are completely different rooms: the Gothic-ceilinged hall at U Medvídků, the eight courtyard-and-cellar halls of U Fleků, and the fiercely guarded tables of U Zlatého tygra, where Bohumil Hrabal held court for decades and drank with Václav Havel and Bill Clinton in 1994. We have set them out as a walking route in Prague’s historic beer halls, and the city list is at the oldest pubs in Prague. For the same tension between old brewery and newer room, see Germany.
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Těrlicko, Moravian-Silesian Region
The 1268 record is a charter of 12 May 1268 in which Duke Vladislav of Opole renewed the rights of the Benedictines of Orlová, among them a tavern (taberna) at Těrlicko alongside those at Žukov and Ostrava; Czech Wikipedia cites Prasek, Dějiny knížectví Těšínského (1894), p. 40. That is a tavern in a charter, not a house or an owner, at the claimed date. Two caveats stay: the charter names the estate's tavern rather
Prague, Czechia
The 1375 is the tavern's own — "Otevřeno od roku 1375" stands on its front page — and CzechTourism repeats it on Kudy z nudy, where the house is called one of the oldest almost continuously open inns in Prague. Prague City Tourism calls it one of the oldest pubs in the city but names no year, and nobody cites a record. Pražský deník, writing on 8 May 2021, is the most careful of them: it reads the inscription on
Prague, Czechia
The house is documented in writing from 1404, but that entry names the house of the late Pavel Hubený and has nothing to do with drink: between about 1410 and 1433 his relatives, one of them Nicolaus the soap-boiler, appear to have boiled soap in it. Malt arrives in 1433, when Mikuláš the maltster bought the house and with it, probably, the right to brew, and from 1438 Jakub Starostka brewed here. Jan Nedvídek, who
Prague, Czechia
The house on Křemenec is first named in writing in 1430, when it belonged to a dyer called Petr. The 1499 the brewery gives is the year Vít Skřemenec and his wife Dorota bought the house called At the Two Magpies and began the malting trade in it — a maltster's purchase rather than a tavern licence, which is the house's own wording on its own history page. Brewing has gone on here since, the dark 13-degree lager
Prague, Czechia
The 1816 beer-hall date comes from the pub's own history and no independent record for it was found. Prague City Tourism's account of the house — Gothic, its tower raised in 1514, the walking-tiger relief in place since 1702, renamed At the Golden Tiger by Jan František Lehr in 1786 after being At the Black Lion from 1523 — records a refreshment house here in 1835, Šoch's café, whose regulars included Tyl, Mácha and
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