Which is the oldest csárda in Hungary?

On what is published about them, the Hortobágyi Nagycsárda: the monument register dates the house to 1699 and Hungarian Wikipedia's parish history agrees, which is two publishers with no interest in the business. Neither cites a city minute or a licence, so the year dates purpose-built inn fabric rather than a first drink.

A Hungarian roadside inn, standing alone rather than in a street, usually with stables or a wagon shelter attached and a cellar under the drinking room. Ours are recorded as inns, because the site's categories describe the kind of house rather than the local word for it, and the word stays where a reader meets it, in the writing.

Was the Hortobágy csárda founded in 1781?

That year circulates as a founding date and the monument register gives it as a rebuilding. The register records the house as built in 1699 and rebuilt twice, in 1781 and again in 1830, which is the ordinary life of a plain building that had to be repaired after storms, traffic and war rather than a second founding.

Why is the Kondorosi Csárda out of the ranking?

Because the drinking stopped. Hungarian Wikipedia's account has the house used as a store and then as a party office after the Second World War, and working as a csárda again only from 1955, when the local farming co-operative took it on. It keeps its page, its pin and its museum of the outlaw years.

Can you get a drink in these houses without eating?

At Kondoros, yes: the csárda publishes a drinks card of its own, valid from 25 November 2025, pricing draught beer by the fifth, third and half litre and pálinka by the measure. At the Százéves Étterem in Budapest nobody publishes an answer, and that open question is printed on its page rather than guessed at.

3 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026

The oldest pub in Hungary

The short answer

Oldest claim

Hortobágyi Nagycsárda

Says 1699. The first record is 1699.

Grade A · Documented

By claim and by record the earliest date in Hungary on this list belongs to the same house: the Hortobágyi Nagycsárda, which the Hungarian monument register dates to 1699 under törzsszám 1851, and which Hungarian Wikipedia's history of the parish has raised in the summer of that year at the Debrecen end of the river crossing. No document behind it has been read here, so the year rests on the register's dating of purpose-built inn fabric and on local history. The Kondorosi Csárda carries an older tradition, the 1740s, and its first record is the military survey of 1784.

Two of the three Hungarian houses here are csárdák, and a csárda is not a village pub. It is a roadside inn that stands on its own outside the settlements, put up where a crossing, a toll point or a meeting of roads made traffic stop: stables and a wagon shelter, a drinking room with an open chimney, a cellar for wine and another for pálinka. Both of ours are on the Great Plain, one at a bridgehead on the salt road into Debrecen and one where eight roads meet on the Békés plain, and both were built by a landowner — a city in the first case, an estate in the second — rather than grown out of somebody's front room. The third is a Budapest étterem in a baroque palace, which is the other Hungarian pattern: the town house whose ground floor was let to an innkeeper. Wine here is still measured out by the decilitre, the unit a borozó, or wine room, sells it in, and the Hortobágy csárda prices its house wine that way on its own list. What decides the grades is a single institution. The monument register at muemlekem.hu carries each house under a törzsszám, dates its fabric, records its rebuildings, classes what it was originally for and even publishes a condition report — and it is not a licence. A register can call a building a drinking and entertainment house without naming the year a drink was first sold in it.

A bridgehead, a crossroads and a palace ground floor

Hortobágyi Nagycsárda stands on the puszta at the foot of the Nine-arched bridge, and the reason it is there is a toll. Debrecen held this stretch of the salt road, put the house up beside the crossing and made its own tavern-keeper the collector, which is a rare case of a drinking house whose purpose is recorded in the same breath as its founding. The wagon shelter of 1785 across the road is now the Shepherds’ Museum. Kondorosi Csárda is the better building and the worse-documented house: baroque, with a granary attached, a barrel-vaulted wine cellar, a pálinka cellar across from it and the open chimney of the drinking room above, all described in the register down to the fabric. Arany János set a poem beside it, and the cellars and the chimney passage are shown to visitors. Százéves Étterem is the city entry, on the ground floor of the Péterffy palace: Hasslinger’s inn, At the City of Buda, opened in the building in 1831, the Kris family held it for seventy-seven years from 1864 trading first as the White Ship, and the centenary in 1931 gave the house both its present name, Hundred Years, and the carved serving counter, Transylvanian stove and music box that carry applied-art protection today.

What the monument register settles, and what it leaves open

The register is the best thing about researching Hungary and it answers a question next to the one this site asks. At Kondoros, entry 2495 under törzsszám 9655, it dates the standing house to about 1784 and describes the interior in detail — which is precisely the year of the first record anyone can point at, the military survey of 1784, and forty-four years after the 1740s the house dates itself to. Hungarian Wikipedia fills the gap with a story rather than a document: a first house of adobe and reed in the early 1740s, no builder named, burned by men from Gyoma in 1783 out of revenge, and the baroque csárda raised the next year on the Harruckern estate. So the claim is tradition and the record is the survey, which is why that house is graded C while the Hortobágy house, whose register entry dates purpose-built inn fabric to the claimed year itself, is graded A. Neither grade rests on a licence, and both notes say so. The Budapest case is different again: the register lists the palace under number 15429, credits it to András Mayerhoffer and dates it 1744, where the Budapest Lexicon has János Péterffy beginning to build in 1755 — two respectable sources eleven years apart on a house whose inn is not the thing either of them is dating. For the order in which those tests are worth applying, see how historians date an old pub.

The question that is still open in Budapest

The Százéves Étterem is the one house here whose admission rests on a fitting rather than on a sentence. This site asks first whether a member of the public can be served a drink without ordering a meal, and nothing published about the restaurant answers it either way. What is published is the counter: a carved serving bar installed at the centenary in 1931 and protected as applied art, which is a bar in the plain sense of the word and the whole of the evidence for a yes. The question sits on the page in those words, and it will be settled by somebody who can read a Budapest licensing record or simply walk in and ask.

Where Hungary sits in the wider list

Three houses is thin for a country with a csárda tradition this well documented, and the gap is ours rather than Hungary’s: Eger, Tokaj, Pécs, Szeged and the Buda side of the capital are unworked here, and the register that carries the two houses above carries a great many more buildings we have not read. For the nearest comparisons, the cellar and the Gasthaus under the same former monarchy, see the oldest pubs in Austria, and for a neighbouring country whose heritage register does most of the dating, the oldest pubs in Poland. For how a claim is weighed against a record on this site, read the methodology; the full international ranking is at the top 100 oldest pubs.

Hungary

Open the full map

The contenders, oldest claim first

ClaimProof

Hortobágyi Nagycsárda
Grade A
Hortobágy, Hajdú-Bihar
Three publishers with no interest in the house agree on 1699, and one of them says what happened that year. The Hungarian monument register, entry 5333 under törzsszám 1851, dates the building to that year, records that it was rebuilt in 1781 and again in 1830, and classes it as a commercial and hospitality building — its original type given as a drinking and entertainment house. Hungarian Wikipedia's history of the
Dated 1699 by its listing; first recorded 1699; building c.1699.
Kondorosi Csárda
Grade C
Kondoros, Békés
The house dates itself about 1740, at the meeting of eight roads, and says it has been receiving guests since 1784. Hungarian Wikipedia gives the fuller account: a first house of adobe and reed in the early 1740s, builder unknown, burned by men from Gyoma in 1783 out of revenge, and a baroque csárda with a granary raised in 1784 under Baron Ferenc Domonkos Harruckern. The first mention it can point to is the
Claims 1740; first recorded 1784; building c.1784.
Százéves Étterem
Grade A
Budapest, Hungary
The Budapest Lexicon, summarised in Hungarian Wikipedia's account of the Péterffy palace, says tradition puts an eating house in the building in the second half of the eighteenth century and that Hasslinger's inn, At the City of Buda, certainly opened here in 1831. The Kris family held it for seventy-seven years from 1864, trading first as the White Ship and then under their own name, and the present name was taken
Claims 1831; first recorded 1831.

The photographs above are other people's work, used under open licences. Every photographer, licence and source page is named in the image credits.

Common questions

Which is the oldest csárda in Hungary?: On what is published about them, the Hortobágyi Nagycsárda: the monument register dates the house to 1699 and Hungarian Wikipedia's parish history agrees, which is two publishers with no interest in the business. Neither cites a city minute or a licence, so the year dates purpose-built inn fabric rather than a first drink.
What is a csárda?: A Hungarian roadside inn, standing alone rather than in a street, usually with stables or a wagon shelter attached and a cellar under the drinking room. Ours are recorded as inns, because the site's categories describe the kind of house rather than the local word for it, and the word stays where a reader meets it, in the writing.
Was the Hortobágy csárda founded in 1781?: That year circulates as a founding date and the monument register gives it as a rebuilding. The register records the house as built in 1699 and rebuilt twice, in 1781 and again in 1830, which is the ordinary life of a plain building that had to be repaired after storms, traffic and war rather than a second founding.
Why is the Kondorosi Csárda out of the ranking?: Because the drinking stopped. Hungarian Wikipedia's account has the house used as a store and then as a party office after the Second World War, and working as a csárda again only from 1955, when the local farming co-operative took it on. It keeps its page, its pin and its museum of the outlaw years.
Can you get a drink in these houses without eating?: At Kondoros, yes: the csárda publishes a drinks card of its own, valid from 25 November 2025, pricing draught beer by the fifth, third and half litre and pálinka by the measure. At the Százéves Étterem in Budapest nobody publishes an answer, and that open question is printed on its page rather than guessed at.