A weekly ritual in which the entire city dresses up, sits outside, and makes one coffee last three hours.
On Saturday morning, between roughly ten and one, a large proportion of central Zagreb puts on good clothes, walks to the streets around Cvjetni trg and Bogovićeva, and sits down outside a café.
They order one coffee. They stay for two or three hours. They watch everybody else, and everybody else watches them.
This is špica, and it is the most characteristic thing in the city.
What it actually is
Part social ritual, part fashion parade, part information exchange. It is where you find out who is back from abroad, who has split up with whom, and what is happening.
It is intergenerational — you will see people in their eighties at one table and students at the next — and it is taken seriously enough that people dress for it.
There is no organisation, no start time and no venue. It is simply what is done, and it has been done since well before anyone gave it a name.
Where
Bogovićeva, Cvjetni trg (properly Trg Petra Preradovića), Preradovićeva and the surrounding pedestrian streets. Continuous café terraces on all of them.
Also Tkalčićeva and the Zrinjevac end of the Green Horseshoe, but the centre of gravity is Cvjetni.
Coffee, properly
Croatian café culture is Central European rather than Italian. You sit. You are not expected to stand at a bar and leave.
Kava s mlijekom — coffee with milk. Bijela kava — more milk. Macchiato is very common and does not mean what it means in Italy. Espresso if you want it short.
A glass of water arrives with it, unasked, and is free.
Table service is standard. You wait to be served, you do not go to a counter, and you pay at the end.
Tipping is rounding up. Ten per cent in a restaurant; in a café, leaving the coins.
The rules
Do not hurry. The waiter will not bring the bill until you ask. If they brought it after twenty minutes it would be an insult.
Do not order food. Špica is coffee. Some places do cake; almost nobody eats a meal.
Sit outside if there is any possibility of it. Zagreb’s terraces are heated and open in February, and being inside on a Saturday morning defeats the purpose.
Smoking is permitted on terraces and widely done. Croatia is not a country that has stopped smoking.
Joining in
You are entirely welcome and nobody will notice you. Take a table, order one coffee, and stay.
It is also the cheapest sustained entertainment in the city — a coffee in central Zagreb costs a fraction of what it does in western Europe, and it buys you a seat for as long as you want it.
If you do only one thing in Zagreb that is not a museum, do this one, and do it on a Saturday.
