U Krále Brabantského, Prague

The claim

A tavern in a burgher house on the lane that climbs from the Lesser Town to the Castle steps. The house claims 1375, and gives its evenings to a medieval feast with jugglers, fire and swordplay. Its own documented history is nineteenth-century: a landlord bought the business in 1884 and was murdered here that December, and the tale of Wenceslas IV drinking here incognito was told by a later one.

What the records show

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 number 15, that here from time out of mind stands the sign of the King of Brabant, and says 1375 is the year traditionally given for the founding. That is a description of a tradition, not of a document. The record is later and firmer. The Czech register of cultural monuments enters the burgher house as 39185/1-653, protected since 22 December 1964, and dates it to a rebuilding after the mid-sixteenth-century fire and another of 1629–1633, with a street front of the late nineteenth century. The Czech Wikipedia account, which follows Lukáš Berný's history of the Lesser Town's pubs, says the inn in it probably began at the end of the nineteenth century and had a run of landlords who made little of it: Antonín Hrdlička worked here, Václav Petráň bought the house from him in 1884, and on 9 December that year Hrdlička came back to rob him and killed him instead. Prague's own trade directories, digitised by the Czech National Library, are the first primary record of the sign that anyone here has read, and they are of 1901: the city address book for that year lists Antonie Hrzanová as the holder of the innkeeping trade at the sign of the King of Brabant in Thunovská, and repeats her in its roll of innkeepers by house sign. Two details in it want saying. The directory gives the number as Thunovská 18 where the house trades today at number 15, and the German-language trade address book of the Protectorate for 1939 has "U Krále Brabantského", kept by Václav Plic, at Thunovská 15 — so either the business moved a few doors or the street was renumbered between the two, and nothing traced from here settles which. The other is a trap for anyone hunting the name: a second house of the same sign stood in Žižkov, in Husova ulice, and the chronicle of royal Prague printed in 1903 lists it there. The story of Wenceslas IV drinking here incognito with his executioner was, on the Czech encyclopaedia's account, probably invented by Emanuel Klucker, who took the beer hall on in 1912. In the 1960s and 1970s the rooms were one of the Lesser Town meeting places of the Czech underground; new owners rebuilt them after 2007 into the medieval feast staged here now. So the house is old and the tavern is not, which is a C, and drink-led trade documented from 1884 keeps it out of the Top 100. Nobody has to eat to drink here: the rooms open at eleven and the show does not begin until seven.

Dated evidence for U Krále Brabantského, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1375	Claimed founding	The pub
c.1629	Present building	Czech register of cultural monuments, entry 39185/1-653, read in the wikitext of the Czech Wikipedia list of monuments for the upper Lesser Town
1884	First record of a drinking house here	Czech National Library

What to look for inside

An inscription on the front says the house has carried the sign of the King of Brabant from time out of mind
Named for John I, Duke of Brabant, the historical figure behind Gambrinus
A meeting place of the Czech underground in the 1960s and 1970s, where samizdat changed hands
Medieval feasts with jugglers and fire-eaters from seven, Tuesday to Sunday

Visiting

U Krále Brabantského is in Prague, Czechia, at Thunovská 198/15, 118 00 Praha 1 – Malá Strana. 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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