Trgovacki Kasino (Commercial Casino)

Trgovacki Kasino (Commercial Casino) Review

Cakovec's main square, Trg Republike, is a mostly bland, modern affair—with the striking exception of Trgovacki Kasino. Odd that the key gathering place of the town's early-20th-century rising bourgeois class should have survived the communist era intact, but here it has stood since 1903, wearing its Hungarian art nouveau style very much on its sleeve: red brick interspersed with a white stucco background, squares and circles across the bottom, curved lines formed by the brickwork working their way to the top. Back in its heyday, this was much more than a casino in the gambling sense of the word: in addition to a card room and a game parlor, it housed a ladies' salon, a reading room, and a dance hall. It was mostly a trade-union headquarters in the post-World War II era—and so it is today, rendering the inside off-limits to the public. Just off the main square, by the way, is Trg Kralja Tomislava, the town's one and only major pedestrian shopping street.