Gospoda Pod Modrym Fartuchem, Toruń

The claim

A brick house on Toruń's New Town market square, with a baroque front of the early eighteenth century over cellars a good deal older. Polish cooking is served at the tables and the evening trade is beer: the house keeps some three hundred regional and craft brews and calls that side of itself Krajina Piva, Beer Country. Poland's heritage register dates the first recorded mention of an inn on the spot to 1489.

What the records show

The house claims 1489 — "tradycyjnie od 1489 r." — and for once the national register says the same year. The record for Rynek Nowomiejski 8 published by Poland's Narodowy Instytut Dziedzictwa states that the first confirmed mention of an inn on this spot comes from 1489, and dates the fabric in stages: brick houses whose cellars survive, possibly raised in the 1420s; the baroque front at the beginning of the eighteenth century; a range added behind in the late nineteenth; a full restoration between 1955 and 1959. The same record says the premises have served their original purpose without interruption since they were built, which is a strong sentence for a register to write and is still not a licence or a deed — the 1489 mention itself is cited rather than quoted, and we have not seen it. Nor has anyone here found it anywhere else. The National Library of Poland's digital collections were searched for the house on 12 September 2026 and hold one item under the name: a photograph of the Gospoda "Pod Modrym Fartuchem" taken in 1919 by Günter Reinert, catalogued among German photographs of Toruń and indexed under taverns and restaurants. Nothing printed earlier than the twentieth century came back, and the other thing the library holds under the sign is a novel — Maria Bogusławska's Gospoda pod Modrym Fartuszkiem of 1922, a historical romance set in seventeenth-century Pomerania, which is a story about the house rather than evidence of it. The name is younger than the trade: the register puts Modry Fartuch, the blue apron the town's craftsmen wore, in the baroque period, and the legend of a particular innkeeper founding the house belongs to the town's storytelling rather than to the record. Toruń's tourism service calls it the oldest catering house in the town and counts two hundred kinds of beer; the house counts three hundred and calls that side of itself Krajina Piva. Polish local titles reported that it announced a closure during the pandemic and was then taken on again, and neither report could be read from here because both titles refuse an automated request, so this row rests on what it can show: its own site was live on 12 September 2026 with a menu, a booking page and hours from noon, and OpenStreetMap carries the same hours.

Dated evidence for Gospoda Pod Modrym Fartuchem, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1489	Claimed founding	The pub
1489	First record of a drinking house here	Polona, National Library of Poland

What to look for inside

Poland's heritage register dates the first mention of an inn here to 1489
Named after the blue aprons of the town's craftsmen
Some three hundred regional and craft beers in the evening

Visiting

Gospoda Pod Modrym Fartuchem is in Toruń, Poland, at Rynek Nowomiejski 8, 87-100 Toruń. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

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