Explore Sarajevo / Hidden Gems / Dibek
Hidden Gem · Baščaršija · 4 min read
Dibek
A 130-year-old coffee house where the beans are still pounded into powder by hand, on a stone mortar, with a metal rod.
- Established
- 1895
Address
Trgovke 9, Baščaršija
Hours
Typically 09:00–23:00
Price
Bosnian coffee ~3–4 BAM
Getting there
4 min walk east of the Sebilj fountain
Time needed
An hour, properly done
Best time
Mid-afternoon, when the bazaar is loudest
Coordinates
43.8592° N 18.4318° E
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In a city that lives by coffee, Dibek is the place where the coffee is still made the old way. Not the old way as in traditional brewing — most of Sarajevo’s cafés still serve the proper bosanska kafa in a fildžan — but the old way as in the bean was pounded by hand on a stone mortar, not crushed by a grinder. There are perhaps two or three places left in Bosnia doing it this way. Dibek is the most famous of them, and the only one in central Sarajevo.
The method, and why it matters
The café takes its name from its central object: the dibek, a heavy stone mortar set into the wall near the entrance. The beans are roasted on the premises, then placed inside the mortar and pounded with a long metal rod called a ćuskija until they break down into powder. The powder is sifted; the larger pieces go back into the dibek to be pounded again. The whole process is slow, manual, and unmistakably percussive — you hear it before you smell it.
The reason for the persistence of the method is not nostalgia, or rather, not only nostalgia. Pounded coffee tastes different from ground coffee. Grinding shears the bean and exposes more of its surface to air, oxidising the oils. Pounding fractures the bean instead, releasing the oils more slowly and producing a powder of irregular shape that brews at a different rate. The result is fuller-bodied, less bitter, with a different aromatic profile entirely. Whether one is better than the other is a matter of taste; that they are different is not.
Not Turkish coffee
This is worth saying clearly. Bosnian coffee is not Turkish coffee, and Bosnians will correct you, gently or otherwise, if you confuse the two. The bean is the same. The pot, the džezva, is the same shape. The difference is in the sequence of the brew: a Turk puts the ground coffee into cold water before lighting the flame; a Bosnian boils the water first, lifts the pot, stirs in the grounds, and brings it briefly back to a boil to raise the foam. The interviewee Brad Cohen quoted in a 2014 BBC Travel piece put it tersely: “Bosnian coffee is not Turkish coffee.” Spend a morning at Dibek and you understand why the distinction matters.
A 130-year story
Dibek has been a coffee house since 1895, when the great-grandfather of the present owner’s wife first opened a small kafana in this corner of the bazaar. The business has stayed in the family — through Austro-Hungarian rule, two world wars, socialist Yugoslavia, the 1990s siege, and the post-war decades — and the dibek itself has been working the whole time. It is one of the few small businesses in the bazaar with this kind of unbroken continuity.
The current café occupies a long, narrow space on Trgovke street, just east of the Sebilj. There is a small front room with low Ottoman benches and copper trays; a larger back room with traditional seating, hookahs, and a slightly slower clientele; and a small terrace in summer. The walls carry old photographs, a few certificates, the kind of accumulated decoration that does not look curated because it isn’t.
What to order
The menu is short and correct. Bosanska kafa — Bosnian coffee — is the obvious order, served in a small džezva with a fildžan, a glass of water, and a sugar cube. Allow forty minutes minimum. The coffee will keep its heat in the džezva for at least that long.
Salep in winter — a thick, warming drink made from orchid root, traditionally spiced with cinnamon. Boza in summer — slightly fizzy, lightly sweet, fermented from millet. Tea in any season; the čaj od mente (mint tea) is good. There are a few simple sweets — rahat lokum, baklava, sometimes tufahija — but you do not come to Dibek for the kitchen.
If you smoke, hookahs are available with a long list of flavours; if you don’t, the smoke is light enough that it does not dominate the room.
Why bother
For the same reason anyone bothers with handmade things in an age when machines are faster. The coffee tastes different. The room moves at a different speed. The man in the back is still using a mortar that the man’s grandfather’s father bought, in a city that has done its level best to keep losing things for the last hundred years and has, in this one small corner, refused.
Sit. Order. Listen for the sound of the ćuskija hitting the dibek. That is the soundtrack you came for.
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Ph: Bjoertvedt · CC BY-SA 3.0
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