Self-guided walk · Vienna
The Vienna historic pub walk is a self-guided route of 0.94 km between 3 old pubs, about 13 min walking, with a GPX file to follow. Griechenbeisl makes the oldest claim on it, 1476; the oldest record on the walk belongs to Esterházykeller, from 1828.
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The distance is the walked street route, not the straight line. These are history walks, not a drinking challenge: take it slowly, drink water between stops, and leave a pub out if the day is getting long.
Vienna’s oldest rooms: a beisl, a counter and a cellar. A beisl, a grocer's counter and a cellar, strung across the Innere Stadt from the Fleischmarkt to the lanes behind the Graben. They date themselves to about 1476, 1618 and 1683, and in two of the three cases the year over the door dates something other than a room you could buy a drink in.
Fleischmarkt 11, Innere Stadt, 1010 Vienna
A corner house at the foot of the Griechengasse in Vienna, first recorded in 1350, where a beisl is named in the records from 1447. A restaurant now, and a beisl then. It takes its name from the Greek merchants who settled the street, keeps a room of signatures from Bismarck to Schiele, and another for the balladeer Augustin, who is said to have fallen into a plague pit drunk and climbed out alive.
830 m to stop 2 · about 11 min
Bognergasse 5, Innere Stadt, 1010 Vienna
A delicatessen with a bar and a brasserie beside it, on a lane behind the Graben. The rooms are Jugendstil of 1901, all dark wood and tiling, and the counter serves wine, coffee and open sandwiches from eight in the morning. The business dates itself to 1618, when a merchant named Cameel bought the house and gave the shop his own name; the wine room came two hundred years after that.
120 m to stop 3 · about 2 min
Haarhof 1, Innere Stadt, 1010 Vienna
A cellar two floors under the Esterházy palace in the Haarhof, a lane off the Graben in Vienna, with brick vaulting the house dates to the fifteenth century and a water-cooled counter for bottled wine. It tells the siege of 1683 as its beginning, when the prince's men were given wine before the fighting. The city's own encyclopedia dates the cellar's opening to 1808 and wine by the glass to 1828.
Not everything on this walk is a pub, and the walk is better for it.
The Griechenbeisl is one of the few houses anywhere whose record is older than its claim. It says on its own pages that it has been serving guests for 550 years, which puts the founding around 1476; the first documentary mention of the beisl is given as 1447, and the corner house itself is first recorded in 1350. The City of Vienna’s historical encyclopaedia, drawing on Felix Czeike, is careful about what it will date: a late Gothic dwelling house on a deep plot, a late Gothic oriel, a Baroque front put on in 1709 and a historic public room. The Greek name arrived in the eighteenth century with the Greek and Levantine merchants who settled the Fleischmarkt, and has nothing to do with the cooking; before that it was the Reichenbergerbeisl, after the Bohemian cloth merchants who drank in it.
Zum Schwarzen Kameel dates itself to 1618, when Johann Baptist Cameel, a merchant who had come to Vienna from Brno, bought a house already standing in the Bognergasse and set up a spice and grocery business under his own name. The city’s encyclopaedia puts that a year later. What matters on a walk about drinking is what came next: the shop was extended into a wine room in the nineteenth century, after the former bookkeeper Joseph Stiebitz took the business over in 1818, and the Fremden-Blatt of December 1852 carries the firm’s own advertisement as a spice and wine business, wine sold over a counter. The rooms are younger again — the building was put up new in 1901 and fitted out in the Jugendstil by Portois & Fix.
The Esterházykeller tells the siege of 1683, when Prince Paul Esterházy’s men are said to have been given wine before the fighting. The city’s encyclopaedia, written from property and licensing records, instead has the cellar opening in 1808 and selling nothing under five Maß at a time; only from 1828 was wine also poured by the glass. Adolph von Menzel painted the cellar in 1871. The palace above it was built in 1819, over ground that had carried four separate houses, so the vaults may well be older than the building they are under.
The city’s other houses are at the oldest pubs in Vienna, and the country’s at the oldest pubs in Austria.
