Inside The Kafana: The Cultural Heart Of The Balkans

Part coffee house, part parliament, part stage for the dramas of everyday life, the kafana has long been the Balkans’ unofficial living room.

In the cities and small towns of the Balkans, there is an institution that escapes tidy translation. One might call it a tavern, a café, a bar, or a restaurant—but none of these seem to quite fit the bill. The kafana simply is all that and more. It also functions as a stage, a sanctuary, and a parliament of regulars, in which the tablecloths seep with the undercurrent of the cultural zeitgeist.

The word kafana itself is a linguistic holdover from the days of the empire, deriving from the Turkish kahvehane, or coffee house. In cities such as Belgrade and Sarajevo, the prototypical kafanas were places where you sipped on thick, unfiltered coffee while flipping through the day’s pages, and as time went on, they began to expand their repertoire. Rakija joined, if not replaced, the coffee cup, as grills began to fire and musicians started to appear in the corners. Slowly, it morphed into a place of communal ritual, the Balkans’ great social leveller.

You need only take a step into a traditional kafana before its codes make themselves immediately apparent. With its low lighting and unselfconsciously dated décor, it is manifestly permeated with that after-hours feel. The setting is intimate, with the tables set close enough together that your conversations will be overheard, before eventually merging with the ones of those sat closest to you.

The menu features a hearty blend of dishes that betray not the slightest shred of pretense. Typical fare includes grilled ćevapi with chopped onions and flatbread; platters of cured meats; shopska salad, bright with white cheese; and comforting paprika-laced stews that warm you down to the bones. Alcohol is certainly no afterthought here, with plum or apricot rakija arriving in dangerously potent measures. Beer is served cold and without fuss, while the wine, most often of a local variety, is poured with great generosity.

But to reduce the kafana to its menu is to miss the point of it all. The central occupation is, in actuality, its atmosphere. To understand this, you have to go back to the 19th and early 20th centuries, when kafanas functioned as the epicentre of political and literary life. The tables played host to chain-smoking poets jotting down their half-finished verses, as well as revolutionaries who whispered in conspiratorial tones over their coffee cups. Some historic kafanas in Belgrade even came to be synonymous with particular writers or movements, calling to mind the Left Bank cafés of Paris.

The other essential ingredient to a true dyed-in-the-wool kafana is the music. As night-time falls, you’ll hear the sounds of sevdalinka, starogradska, or turbo-folk emanating from its halls, depending on the hour and the city in question. Where in some cafés it might just be background noise, in kafanas this is rarely the case.

The musical culture is an interactive one, with songs often being requested, dedicated, and sung along to. A musician might find a few banknotes tucked appreciatively into their hand as the night goes on. A kafana at full tilt can somewhat resemble a microcosm of the human condition, with raucous laughter one minute, sorrowful tears the next, and arms slung over strangers’ shoulders throughout.

Considering their origin, culture, and clientele, it’s no surprise that the mythology of the kafana is characterised, in certain respects, by excess. Convention dictates that it’s the location of epic drinking sessions and broken hearts nursed till dawn, and in fairness, there is some truth to that.

While it has long been cast as a masculine space where the air runs thick with cigarette smoke and bravado, to pigeonhole it in this manner would be to do it a disservice. It is, more than that, also a venue of celebration, with its walls being no strangers to weddings that spill onto the pavement, joyous birthday celebrations, and football victories toasted into the wee hours.

The old kafana has seen a rising threat in recent years, with the uptick in slick cocktail bars and minimalist cafés encroaching upon territory previously uncontested. While some have adapted, taking pains to polish their image to cater to tourists, others cling stubbornly still to their scuffed floors and faded photographs. But if there is one constant that remains, it’s the sense that the kafana has never been a place to just eat or drink, but somewhere you can belong—if only for an evening.

Opening photo: Aristote2 | Wikimedia Commons