Cetinjska Street fifteen—the courtyard of the old brewery

Cetinjska Street, fifteen, is now arranged as a collection of separate venues around a shared space. This is the layout of a factory courtyard: raw materials were brought through it and beer was taken out, while production buildings, warehouses, and workshops stood along its sides.

The first manually operated brewery at the corner of Cetinjska Street and Skadarska Street was opened around eighteen fifty by the Belgrade entrepreneur Filip Đorđević. The business changed hands several times and incurred losses. In eighteen eighty-eight, the Bajloni family bought the enterprise—the very family whose name remained with the neighboring market.

Jakov Bajloni, a merchant who had learned the cooper's trade in his youth at one of Vienna's breweries, was put in charge of the brewery. His skills had a literal value here: beer was sold and transported in wooden barrels, and he had to compete with the much larger brewery of Đorđe Vajfert. Jakov decided to invest the family money in expansion, although the two previous owners had already been unable to manage the enterprise.

He bought up neighboring plots, ordered equipment from Austria-Hungary and Germany, and built a malt house. At first, water was supplied here through the brewery's own pipeline from the Danube River; later, artesian wells were drilled within the factory grounds. The Bajlonis hired coopers, blacksmiths, carpenters, mechanics, and harness makers; some of the craftsmen lived right at the factory. This is how an entire operation with workshops, housing, stables, and warehouses grew up around the old small brewery. Over a little more than two decades, output increased more than tenfold, and the enterprise surpassed Đorđe Vajfert's brewery.

Production under different names continued here until two thousand six. After the complex was sold, beer brewing stopped and the premises stood empty. Nine years later, the organizer Marko Radojković and his team from the Kišobran cultural association were looking for a permanent home for Zaokret. For six years, they had held music nights and small cultural events at other venues; they had no space of their own.

On December seventeenth, twenty fifteen, the team opened Zaokret in the former brewery. They did not have enough money or space for a large cultural center, so they set up a bar where they could hold concerts, radio programs, creative workshops, and evenings with DJs. After them, tenants occupied other buildings, clearing construction debris from the rooms. Separate factory premises allowed each team to run its own program, while the shared courtyard allowed visitors to move between them without going back out onto the street.

Zaokret is still by the entrance. Around the former factory courtyard, bars, concert venues, a gallery, and a record store operate; Kula Art Center is open in the tower, and a parking lot still occupies the middle of the courtyard.