Explore Sarajevo / Hidden Gems / Caffe Divan
Hidden Gem · Sarači, Stari Grad · 3 min read
Caffe Divan
The working café inside the 16th-century Morića Han courtyard — slow Bosnian coffee in one of the oldest still-operating commercial buildings in Sarajevo.
- Established
- Café opened mid-20th century; building 1551
- By
- Building — Gazi Husrev-beg's vakuf, mid-16th century
Address
Sarači 77, Baščaršija, Stari Grad (in the Morića Han courtyard)
Hours
Typically 08:00–23:00
Price
Bosnian coffee ~3 BAM; tea 3–5 BAM
Getting there
Tram to Baščaršija; two-minute walk west on Sarači
Time needed
An hour, comfortably
Best time
Mid-afternoon, when the courtyard is in soft light and the bazaar's noise muffles to the level of the fountain
Coordinates
43.8596° N 18.4299° E
Navigate
Caffe Divan is the small working café that occupies the courtyard of Morića Han — the 16th-century Ottoman caravanserai at Sarači 77. It is, in practical terms, the public room of one of the oldest still-operating commercial buildings in Sarajevo. The walls around you were built in 1551, during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, as the city’s principal traveller’s inn. The courtyard you are sitting in was where a few hundred merchants, drovers, and pilgrims a night unsaddled their horses, washed at the central stone fountain, and ate a meal. Five centuries later it is a café.
For the building’s full history — the vakuf (waqf) that endowed it, the fires it survived, the 1995 restoration — see the Morića Han page. This page is about what the café feels like to sit in.
The room
Caffe Divan occupies the cobbled rectangle of the open courtyard, with low wooden tables and traditional cushions arranged along the walls. A stone fountain trickles at the centre of the space. The two surrounding storeys of the caravanserai are now small shops — leather, copper, antique books — that quietly continue the bazaar’s character without intruding on the café tables below. Above the courtyard is an opening to the sky; in summer it lets light fall across the cushions, and in winter the room becomes a small enclosed warmth with the fountain still running.
This is one of the rooms in central Sarajevo that has not been substantially altered in modern memory. The proportions are Ottoman. The materials are Ottoman. The light, on a quiet afternoon, is exactly the light a 16th-century traveller would have seen as the last business of the day was finished and the inn-keeper began heating coffee for the evening.
What to order
A Bosnian coffee in the traditional service — small džezva, fildžan, sugar cube, water glass. About 3 BAM. The kitchen also serves a long list of teas, some traditional (mint, rose, rosehip) and some imported (a serious selection of black and herbal). In summer a lemonade or a sherbet are honest orders. There is no full kitchen; this is a place to drink, not eat.
If you have a choice of seating, take a low cushion seat along the south wall. The afternoon light there is the kindest the courtyard offers, and the wall behind you is the one part of the building that dates from 1551.
How to use it
Walk west from the Sebilj along Sarači for about a hundred metres. The entrance to Morića Han is on the right — a heavy arched gateway in carved stone, with the courtyard visible beyond. Walk in. The café is the courtyard.
Order. Sit. The day will slow.
Caffe Divan is not a destination in the way Park Prinčeva is a destination — there is no view, no tasting menu, no event. It is simply one of the calmest, oldest, most beautifully proportioned small rooms in central Sarajevo, available for the price of a Bosnian coffee. That is enough.
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Ph: Desemeus · CC BY-SA 4.0
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