Urban life in Lithuania during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (2). Inns

ENUntil now, it has not been established what kind of public catering institutions there have been in Vilnius, what were their names, what kind of institutions were established, and what their establishment depended on. It has not been ascertained when the first cafés and tea houses, confectionaries, billiard rooms, and institutions of a similar type appeared in our capital city. We are unaware what institutions of this type prevailed and how they looked like, what were their characteristic features. While analyzing the buildings in the Old Town of Vilnius and when coming upon this type of institution, which in documents written in Polish are referred to as szynki, it turns out that in some documents they are named karczma, in others – just tavern. Karczma is a term we come across in the sources from the period under review.