Which is the oldest kafana in Belgrade?

Kafana Znak Pitanja is the one both the encyclopaedia and the house itself put first. The building went up in 1823 for Prince Miloš and became a kafana in 1826 under his physician, Ećim-Toma Kostić. It has been a monument of culture since 1946, and it stands opposite the cathedral church on Kralja Petra.

A south-east European coffee house that became a tavern. The name descends from the Turkish kahvehane, the first ones served coffee and tobacco, and Serbian kafane took on cooking in the nineteenth century. We record them as taverns, because the site's categories describe the kind of house rather than the local word, which stays in the writing.

Why is there a question mark over the door?

Because a name had to come down. The house had traded as Kod Saborne crkve, by the cathedral church, and during a dispute over that name its owner hung up a question mark instead. Nobody ever replaced it, and the sign became the name Belgraders use: Znak pitanja.

Why is Znak Pitanja graded B rather than A?

Because of where the account was read, not what it says. Drinking three years after a dated building would ordinarily be an A here. The chain runs through Serbian Wikipedia rather than through the record it rests on, and the Serbian heritage institute's entry could not be fetched, so the grade waits on the register.

Is Kafana Lončić at Sombor still open?

We believe so and cannot confirm it. Radio-Television Vojvodina reported in December 2017 that the house had worked without a break since 1884, shutting only when the occupying army entered the town in 1941, and OpenStreetMap's survey still tags it a pub. Nothing newer has been found, and the page says so.

3 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026

The oldest pub in Serbia

The short answer

Oldest claim

Kafana Znak Pitanja

Says 1823. The first record is 1826.

Grade A · Documented

By claim and by record the earliest Serbian date on this list belongs to the same house: Kafana Znak Pitanja on Kralja Petra in Belgrade, built in 1823 for Prince Miloš and given three years later to his physician, who turned it into a kafana. Serbian Wikipedia carries both dates; the heritage institute's own entry could not be read from here, which is why the grade is B rather than A. The other two give 1864 and 1884, neither with a document behind it.

A kafana is the institution to understand before any Serbian date means much. The word comes through Turkish kahvehane, itself from the Persian for a coffee house, and that is what the first ones were: rooms for coffee, with pipes, in a city the Ottomans held. Food arrived in the Serbian kafana during the nineteenth century and music never left, so what a visitor meets now is a room where coffee, rakija and beer, a plate of something and a band are all on the same premises and nobody is expected to choose. That breadth is why the ordinary European test of a drinking house — can somebody walk in and be served a drink without ordering a meal — has to be asked of each one separately here, and why the answer is published on each page rather than assumed. The dating is a second problem. Serbia designates monuments of culture and has done since the 1940s, but the institute's registers are hard to read from outside the country, so the years on this page reach us through the Serbian encyclopaedia, the province's public broadcaster and the houses' own front pages. Two of the three sit in Belgrade, and the third is a market-town room in Vojvodina that is a different kind of place altogether.

Two Belgrade rooms and a market-town kafana in Vojvodina

Kafana Znak Pitanja is low, dark and close enough to the cathedral church to have been named after it once. Naum Ičko built the house in 1823 on Prince Miloš’s order; in 1826 it passed to Ećim-Toma Kostić, the prince’s physician, who opened the kafana. It has been a monument of culture since 1946. Tri Šešira is on the cobbles of Skadarska, and its name is a shop sign that outlived its shop: three tin hats hung over a hatter’s workshop, and when a kafana opened in the room in 1864 the hats stayed. Belgrade’s night life arrived around it in 1901, when the Dardaneli kafana was pulled down and the writers and actors moved up the hill; the poet Đura Jakšić lodged across the street and his death notice in 1878 was posted on these walls. Kafana Lončić is the one that is not Belgrade at all: a low house on the way out of Sombor towards Čonoplja, opened in 1884 and held by one family through four generations, where farmers coming in to market left their horses and carts in the yard and a bell stood by the card table to call the waiter.

What can be dated here, and what cannot

The Belgrade pair show the two ends of the problem. Znak Pitanja has dates that historians rather than landlords produced — a building year, a change of ownership, a use — which is exactly the shape of evidence this site grades highest, and it is held at B only because the chain has been read in the encyclopaedia and not in the archive underneath it. Tri Šešira has the year on its own front page, the encyclopaedia repeating it, and nothing documentary at all, which is a C however plausible the story of the hats. Lončić has a third kind of source entirely: the province’s public broadcaster, reporting in December 2017 on a family business, with the detail that the doors shut only in 1941. Press is not paperwork, and a nine-year-old broadcast is also the most recent thing anybody has published about the house. How those three kinds of evidence are weighed against each other is set out in the methodology and in how historians date an old pub.

Where Serbia sits in the wider list

Three houses is a beginning rather than a survey. Novi Sad, Niš, Subotica and Zemun are unworked here, and so is every kafana that closed — a large category in a country whose cities were rebuilt twice in the twentieth century. Nor has anything been read in Serbian archives; every year above arrives through a publisher. For a neighbour on the same frontier, where the Ottoman and Habsburg centuries left two different kinds of drinking room, see the oldest pubs in Hungary; for the nearest well-documented comparison, Austria. The full international ranking is at the top 100 oldest pubs.

SerbiaCities

Open the full map

The contenders, oldest claim first

ClaimProof

Kafana Znak Pitanja
Grade A
Belgrade, Serbia
The dates here are the historians' rather than the kafana's: its own site claims only to be the oldest kafana in Belgrade and to have kept its rooms for something over two hundred years. Serbia's register of immovable cultural property, kept by the institute for the protection of cultural monuments, tells the story with the state behind it. Its entry for Кафана „?“ dates the house to 1823 and says the chief merchant
Locally dated 1823; first recorded 1826; building c.1823.
Tri Šešira
Grade C
Belgrade, Serbia
The year is the house's own, printed as 1864 through its front page, and two publishers beyond the house now tell the same story. Serbian Wikipedia records a kafana opened in 1864 in a room that had held a hatter's workshop, whose three tin hats gave the house its name and its sign. The Stari Grad municipality, the Belgrade local authority Skadarlija stands in, publishes the same sequence on its own heritage pages
Claims 1864; first recorded 1904.
Kafana Lončić
Grade C
Sombor, Vojvodina
Radio-Television Vojvodina, the province's public broadcaster, reported in December 2017 that Sombor's oldest kafana has worked without a break since 1884, shutting only briefly when the occupying army entered the town in 1941, and that it has been in one family the whole time; the first keepers were Bogoljub Hiđoš and his wife Eržebet, and Aleksandar Katić had it at the time of writing. Serbian Wikipedia gives the
Locally dated 1884; no early record found.

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

Common questions

Which is the oldest kafana in Belgrade?: Kafana Znak Pitanja is the one both the encyclopaedia and the house itself put first. The building went up in 1823 for Prince Miloš and became a kafana in 1826 under his physician, Ećim-Toma Kostić. It has been a monument of culture since 1946, and it stands opposite the cathedral church on Kralja Petra.
What is a kafana?: A south-east European coffee house that became a tavern. The name descends from the Turkish kahvehane, the first ones served coffee and tobacco, and Serbian kafane took on cooking in the nineteenth century. We record them as taverns, because the site's categories describe the kind of house rather than the local word, which stays in the writing.
Why is there a question mark over the door?: Because a name had to come down. The house had traded as Kod Saborne crkve, by the cathedral church, and during a dispute over that name its owner hung up a question mark instead. Nobody ever replaced it, and the sign became the name Belgraders use: Znak pitanja.
Why is Znak Pitanja graded B rather than A?: Because of where the account was read, not what it says. Drinking three years after a dated building would ordinarily be an A here. The chain runs through Serbian Wikipedia rather than through the record it rests on, and the Serbian heritage institute's entry could not be fetched, so the grade waits on the register.
Is Kafana Lončić at Sombor still open?: We believe so and cannot confirm it. Radio-Television Vojvodina reported in December 2017 that the house had worked without a break since 1884, shutting only when the occupying army entered the town in 1941, and OpenStreetMap's survey still tags it a pub. Nothing newer has been found, and the page says so.