In den Ouden Vogelstruys, Maastricht

The claim

A brown café on the corner of the Vrijthof and the Platielstraat, with about 150 chairs on the square outside and drawings of Maastricht regulars on the walls. It calls itself the living room of the city and dates its house to 1309, the year a chapter deed first names the stone house on this corner. The front is of 1730; the first café recorded in it is a koffiehuis of about 1840.

What the records show

The house makes its own claim and makes it carefully: the present front dates from 1730, it says, but the Struys is said to be far older, and the oldest reports of the building go back to 1309, so the café counts a history of more than 700 years. The 1309 is real and it is not about drink. A deed of the St Servaas chapter of 11 September 1309 names a stone house on this corner belonging to a knight of Schonecghen, and in 1414 the same property is the former house of Schonegge. The house name de Struys first appears in 1474, when Peter in den Stroys owned it, and Josua de Grave's drawing of 1669 shows a bird hanging as a sign over the corner. None of that is evidence of public drinking. What the nineteenth century shows instead is a house lived in by a doctor, a paymaster, an excise officer, a man of private means and a shopkeeper, divided behind two front doors — and the first hospitality anyone has traced in it is the koffiehuis the widow Schiffelers-Thijssen kept from about 1840. By the early twentieth century Vrijthof 15 was the café de Struisvogel; Nicolaas Hoen reopened it in April 1908 as the newly restored café-restaurant de oude Struisvogel, and in 1980 the house kept a 250th anniversary that the Dutch Wikipedia article calls somewhat debatable, counting from the 1730 front. That article is blunt about the wider claim: the often-heard assertion that the Vogelstruys is Maastricht's oldest café is not supported by historical evidence, and the oldest mention of a café at this address is nineteenth-century. The national register says the same thing in its own way. The Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed entered the house on 30 June 1966 as monument 27697, and the whole of its description is the broad cornice front with its corner blocks, its Namur stone doorway and the gable stone lettered IN DEN VOGEL STRUYS / 1730 — the register dates nothing here earlier than that stone, and the function it records for the building is a dwelling house, not an inn. Café 't Rozenhoedje on the Boschstraat, which this site also holds, claims 1466 for the title Maastricht's oldest. So a C, with drink-led trade documented from about 1840 and the house outside the Top 100. Drinking without eating is the whole business: the front room is a brown café with a terrace of about 150 chairs on the Vrijthof, the tables are pushed aside for dancing on Friday and Saturday nights, and the dining is next door in the brasserie the house took on in 2019. OpenStreetMap tags the address as a restaurant, which the café's own pages do not bear out.

Dated evidence for In den Ouden Vogelstruys, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1309	Claimed founding	The pub
c.1730	Present building	The gable stone dated 1730 above the door, recorded in the Rijksmonument entry for Vrijthof 15 (27697)
1840	First record of a drinking house here	Rijksmonumentenregister

What to look for inside

A gable stone of an ostrich above the door, lettered IN DEN VOGEL STRUYS and 1730
A cannonball set under a second-floor window, dated 1673 for Louis XIV's siege of Maastricht
Portraits of Maastricht regulars drawn by Frans Vos between 1956 and 1964
The Struyskommitee, founded here in 1981, began the Preuvenemint food festival on the Vrijthof

Visiting

In den Ouden Vogelstruys is in Maastricht, Netherlands, at Vrijthof 15, 6211 LD Maastricht. 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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