About

Pavao Hatz came to Zagreb from Hungary in 1808 and made his money in trade. Twenty years later he built a two-storey house on the corner of what was then Harmica and Bolnicka Street, today Ban Jelacic Square and Gajeva. He hired Bartol Felbinger, the finest architect working in Zagreb in the classicist period, and had the ground floor built for shops and hospitality.

Two years after the house was finished, a bronze Mercury was set on its roof: the Roman god of merchants and travellers, and a fitting mark for a trader's house. The sculptor was Anton Dominik Fernkorn. He was seventeen years old, and it was the first work of his ever shown in public. Thirty-six years later, the same hand produced the monument to Ban Jelacic that still stands in the square outside.

The ground floor became the first cafe on the south side of the square. It changed hands and changed names more than once, one of them Narodna kavana, opened by Andrija Czerni in 1838, before the room settled on the name Zagreb remembers: Velika kavana. The Great Cafe. For most of a century it was where the city met, and the square outside filled and emptied around it. By the time he house came down, the cafe had been running on this corner for ninety years.

Svetozar Milinov, a wholesale cloth merchant, bought the Hatz house and pulled it down. In its place he commissioned Dionis Sunko, the architect of the Esplanade, to design a building that was half department store and half hotel. Rudolf Jungmann ran the construction.

Sunko gave it two characters. The lower floors went up in art deco, all clean geometry and stone. The tower above them was expressionist, and it carried an illuminated sign that could be read from across the square: Hotel Milinov.

The building was finished in May 1929. The doors opened to guests on 19 January 1930, with the city's officials in attendance. One thing was carried over from the house that had stood here before. Workmen lifted the bronze Mercury down from Hatz's roof and set him into the new facade, where he remains today.

In 1937 the building reopened its cafe. Velika kavana returned to the corner it had always occupied, this time with more than a thousand seats, built for a city that took coffee seriously and never rushed an afternoon.

Three years later the hotel was bought by Dubrovacka plovidba, the shipping company of Dubrovnik. The company wanted a presence in the capital, and it gave the building the name of the city it came from.

Hotel Milinov became Hotel Dubrovnik, Velika kavana became Kavana Dubrovnik, and the names have held ever since. More than eighty years later, a hotel on Zagreb's main square still carries the name of a city four hundred kilometres down the coast, and the sign above the door still nods to a merchant fleet on the Adriatic.

The hotel rebuilt its interiors in 1972, but demand had outgrown the building itself. Rather than alter Sunko's facade, it extended along Gajeva Street with something of its own time: a wing behind a mirrored glass front, designed by the architects Ines and Nikola Filipovic and completed in 1982. It added around 150 rooms.

The result is a hotel with two faces. Stand on the square and you see 1929, in stone, with Mercury above the third floor. Turn the corner into Gajeva and the whole of the old building is reflected back at you in glass. Guests have been choosing between the two ever since, and both are still working buildings.

The hotel holds 214 rooms and 8 suites across the two buildings. It has renovated them continuously, most recently between 2014 and 2018, when every remaining standard room was brought up to current standard.

Kavana Dubrovnik is still on the ground floor. Mercury is still on the facade, on a corner that has never once stopped serving the public.