špiritana

(Place, tavern, firm, Yugoslavia)

The raw spirit distillery, part of kombinat. I think they were making alcohol from corn, mostly the 97% for technical use. Sometimes they'd run a batch of artificial drinks, i.e. something like 35% with a taste of this or that - rum, whiskey. It was also common to make liqueurs at home, you'd buy a liter of the 97% and then dilute it down to 32% and add any of the available "essences" (so they were called), the concentrates with the taste. The popular things were pear and cherry, perhaps banana. There were also special home recipes - the one with eggs, called "ajer konjak" (eier - eggs in german), or something with chocolate.

The building was perfect, no maintenance since its construction, some time by the beginning of the XX century. So plaster has fallen in places, the roof was leaking, the beams suffered from the chemistry inside. They rather stopped working somewhere after 1990. There were rumours that someone was killed or just died (suicide?) inside. It was a good hideout, hard to keep closed (doors to the street they shared with the front building, this is in the backyard, so only their own doors could be locked), there were holes in the walls and generally the alcoholics' club was rumoured to have a sanctuary, if not headquarters there. The location is near perfect, accessible from the river, a spitting distance from downtown.

Anyway, it was closed during the investigation (or that was the story) and then everyone forgot it. Then it just stayed so for a decade or two, when they found someone hanged (himself or by someone's hand) from one of the remaining beams (roof was gone already). Somehow everyone knows where it is, though perhaps just a few hundred have ever been inside.

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Mentions: 20-IX-1973., 01-XI-1973., 15-XI-1973., 23-V-1975., 12-VII-2001., 02-II-2012., 07-VI-2018., 17-IX-2019., Brandy course, 03-II-2025., 11-VII-2025., kombinat, in serbian

30-IX-2021 - 15-IV-2026