Gospodska Street and the house with the chronogram

Gospodska Street got its name from the prosperous merchant and craft families who kept shops here. After the fire, the southern side of the street, from Glavna Street to the present-day house number fourteen, was rebuilt. Among these houses stands the single-story stone house number six; above its large gate is a plaque with a Latin inscription and several deliberately enlarged letters.

In seventeen seventy, the Zemun merchant Rafael Salamon asked the magistrate to grant him a plot for a house with a shop, or to allow him to buy a completed one. The shop provided him with an income, but Salamon was Jewish, and Zemun's merchants then lived and worked separately according to their faith. The magistrate agreed only to his buying a house in the Jewish quarter. The military command allowed Salamon to move in among Christians, provided that he sold his former house.

Representatives of the Christian community saw him as a competitor. They demanded that the permission be revoked and intended to complain to the emperor. In March seventeen seventy-one, Salamon withdrew from the purchase. The protesters got their way: at that time, he did not obtain a house with a shop among the Christian merchants.

Seventeen years later, soldiers assembled for the Austro-Turkish War were stationed in Zemun. Their carelessness caused a fire. The southern row of what would become Gospodska Street burned down—from Glavna Street to the present-day house number fourteen. An ash-strewn site remained where the former houses had stood.

Rafael Salamon was no longer asking for an empty plot. In seventeen ninety-two, he built a single-story stone structure here, at house number six, and had a Latin inscription placed above the large gate. In translation, it reads: “This house, reduced to ashes, was rebuilt through God's help and through the labor and diligence of its owner.”

Salamon concealed the date within the phrase. Certain letters are written larger: each also serves as a Roman numeral. If their values are added together, the result is seventeen ninety-two—the year construction was completed. This kind of riddle inscription is called a chronogram.

A year later, the street was named Gospodska after the prosperous merchant and craft families who settled here and kept shops. The house was later altered, and the street became pedestrian-only, but the stone plaque was preserved above the gate. Twenty-one years earlier, Salamon had backed down after the protest against his house among the Christian merchants; now the year his own house appeared in Zemun's commercial center is still formed by the letters on its facade.