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Tea Country Disguised as Coffee Country, The Other Serbian Drink

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Ask a Serb about tea and you will usually get one of two reactions. The first is a confession that, to them, tea is what you drink when you are sick. The second is a sudden, unexpectedly detailed lecture about a specific herb that cures a specific complaint. Both are correct, and together they are the whole point: Serbia is a coffee country on the surface and a herbal-tea country underneath. The tea is everywhere once you learn to see it, it is just not where a tea tourist from East Asia or Britain would look for it.

First, the vocabulary

The word is čaj (pronounced roughly "chai"), borrowed: like so much here, from Turkish, which took it from Cantonese like the rest of the world. From it comes the whole little family of words that confuses newcomers:

  • čajnik, the teapot, or the kettle. (Its Russian cousin, чайник / chainik, is well-worn Russian slang for a clueless novice, but that joke never crossed into Serbian; here the word just means the pot.)
  • čajnica / čajdžinica, a tearoom, a place that serves tea. The Ottoman-derived term čajdžinica (built the same way as kafedžinica, "coffeehouse") is what you'll see on the few traditional tea-house signs; čajnica is the plainer everyday word for the same thing, though it's also, confusingly, the name of an unrelated small town in Bosnia's Republika Srpska.
  • čajanka, not a blend and not a brand, but a tea party: a social gathering built around tea, the word itself borrowed from Russian. It's common enough that "the Boston Tea Party" gets rendered in Serbian as bostonska čajanka. It's the word for the gathering, not for what's in the box.

Even so, Serbs overwhelmingly mean the herbal kind when they say čaj at all. "Tea" almost never means the caffeinated Camellia sinensis leaf of China or India, it means an infusion of whatever herb matches the problem. This is why an enthusiastic foreigner asking "do you have tea?" in a Belgrade café can be met with confusion, then a packet of chamomile. You were both right. You were talking about different universes. (For proof of how loosely the word stretches: Šumadijski čaj, "Šumadija tea," isn't tea at all, it's warm plum rakija, spiced and sweetened, drunk on winter nights. If it's hot, in a glass, and shared with ceremony, Serbian will call it čaj.)

The pharmacy is a tea shop

Here is the part that surprises people: in Serbia, the most reliable place to buy herbal tea is not a café or a market, it is the apoteka, the pharmacy. Pharmacies stock walls of loose-leaf and filter-bag herbs alongside the medicine, because in folk practice there is no hard wall between the two. Grandmothers prescribe tea; doctors nod along.

The standard repertoire reads like a materia medica, and almost every Serbian kitchen cupboard holds at least three of these:

  • Kamilica (chamomile, Matricaria chamomilla), the great all-purpose herb, considered a near-panacea. Drunk for calming, for stomach cramps, before sleep; the default "you look tired, drink this" tea.
  • Nana (mint/peppermint): for digestion, bloating, nausea, headaches. The menthol steam is also inhaled for blocked sinuses.
  • Šipak (rosehip), the deep-red, slightly tart cold-weather tea, prized for vitamin C. Čaj od šipka is what gets pressed on you the moment you sneeze in October.
  • Majčina dušica (wild thyme: the name literally means "mother's soul"), the "almost everything" herb; antiseptic, used for coughs, bronchitis, sore throats. Often gargled as well as drunk.
  • Kopriva (nettle): the spring tonic, drunk to "cleanse the blood," support the kidneys, and generally mark the end of winter.
  • Zova (elderflower/elderberry): sweet, floral, drunk hot for colds and cold as a summer cordial.

You will recognise the packaging immediately: the no-frills boxes from brands like Bilje Borča and Franck, or the loose-leaf scooped into paper bags at the pijaca (green market) from barrels of dried flowers. None of it is glamorous. All of it is serious.

The one with its own mountain: Rtanj tea

If Serbian tea culture has a crown jewel, it is planinski čaj, "mountain tea", and Serbia's version of it is Rtanj tea, named for the pyramid-shaped Mount Rtanj in the east of the country.

Rtanj tea comes from Satureja kitaibelii, a wild plant of the savory family (closely related to winter savory, Satureja montana), known locally as planinski čubar. It is effectively endemic to the central Balkan mountains, and its most famous home is Mt. Rtanj itself, roughly 200 km south-east of Belgrade between Boljevac and Sokobanja, where it grows on sun-baked limestone. The tea is made from the dried aerial parts of the plant, ideally cut before it flowers, and brewed into a pale, aromatic, slightly peppery drink.

Locals treat Rtanj tea less as a beverage than as an elixir, "an elixir of energy, strength, and youth" is the phrase you keep hearing. In folk medicine it is the respiratory and digestive herb, prized for its antimicrobial essential oils (thymol and carvacrol, the same compounds that give thyme its punch), and it carries a reputation as a muški čaj, a "men's tea," gently aphrodisiac, sometimes nicknamed the "love plant." Whether any of that is biochemistry or story, the story has been strong enough to nearly love the plant to death.

Because Rtanj tea was over-picked for generations, whole families used to climb the mountain each July 7th for Sveti Jovan Biljober, the feast of St. John the Herb-Picker, Satureja kitaibelii is now protected by Serbian law. Wild picking is forbidden. What you buy today is cultivated by growers who have learned to replicate the mountain's poor, sunny, rocky soil at lower altitude. It is one of the few teas in the world that is both a local folk ritual and a conservation story.

The wider Balkan "mountain tea" family (planinski čaj / gorski čaj) is bigger than Rtanj alone: across the region it also means the yellow-flowered Sideritis, "ironwort," the Greek/Balkan shepherd's tea, brewed long and served with honey and lemon. That one is the everyday mountain tea you'll be handed in the south; Rtanj is the specifically Serbian, specifically protected one. Try both.

The ritual: honey and lemon

How Serbs actually drink the stuff is its own detail. Order tea in a café and you will rarely get a single sad tea bag and a mug. You get the tea, and you get the accompaniments: a slice of lemon (often a generous quarter-lemon to squeeze, not a polite wheel) and, charmingly, a little portioned packet or pot of honey. Milk in tea is almost unheard of. Sugar is available but honey is the default sweetness, and a Serbian grandmother will look at you with real concern if you reach for the white sugar over the honey.

This is the same instinct that sends people to the apoteka: tea is comfort and medicine at once, and honey-and-lemon is how you deliver both. It also explains the running joke that Russians are delighted to find this habit: it is one of the few Serbian café customs that already matches their own (more on the Russian side of the table in Russian culture in Belgrade).

The Serb who gave Russia its tea habit

Here's the historical curiosity that never comes up in the local coffee-vs-tea debate: the reason Russia became a tea-drinking empire at all runs through a Serb.

Count Sava Vladislavich-Raguzinski (1669–1738) was born in Jasenik, in Ottoman Herzegovina, to a Serbian family that had fled north to the merchant republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik): hence the surname. He ended up, via Constantinople and Rome, in the service of Peter the Great, one of a number of Serbs who found more room to rise at the Russian court than under the Ottomans.

In 1725 the Tsar sent Vladislavich to Beijing at the head of a mission of some 1,500 soldiers and 120 staff to settle Russia's border with the Qing Empire for good. Two years of negotiation produced the Treaty of Kyakhta (1727), which fixed the Russo-Chinese frontier and, more consequentially in the long run, opened continuous overland trade between the two empires at the border town of Kyakhta. Vladislavich personally chose the site.

That treaty article launched what became known as the Tea Road: Russian furs going south, Chinese tea coming north by camel caravan, for well over a century. Kyakhta grew rich enough on the exchange to be nicknamed "the Venice of Siberia," and the caravan trade is a major reason Russia, alone among the big European powers, built its national drink around tea carried overland from China, rather than around coffee or tea shipped in by sea. Vladislavich was rewarded with the Order of St. Andrew, and the district around Kyakhta, Troitskosavsk, still carries an echo of his name.

So the next time a Belgrade café pours a raf next to a table of Russian expats (see Russian culture in Belgrade), there's a real case that a Serb is indirectly responsible for the tea habit those very expats grew up with, three centuries and several thousand kilometres removed from the herb-and-honey tradition back home.

Two tea Serbias

What is changing, slowly, is the other half of the story. Alongside the old herbal-pharmacy Serbia, a genuinely new tea culture has taken root in Belgrade and Novi Sad since the early 2020s, one that does mean Camellia sinensis: Chinese gongfu tea, Japanese matcha, Russian raf, British afternoon tea. Places like Kuća čaja (one of the first, opened 2003, and notably a non-smoking pioneer), t element, Tea People, Kung Fu Tea, Salon de thé, and Novi Sad's Seal&Tea now serve the caffeinated leaf with something close to ceremony.

So today there are effectively two tea cultures in Serbia, and they barely acknowledge each other. One is in the pharmacy and the grandmother's cupboard, herbal, medicinal, served with honey and lemon, and built around plants that grow on the nearest mountain. The other is in the new tea houses, imported, caffeinated, performed, and built around leaves that crossed several borders to get here. The full list of where to find the second one is in the best places for tea in Serbia. The first one you find by walking into any apoteka and saying you have a sore throat.

If you try one thing

If you only sample one thread of this, make it Rtanj tea, ideally bought from a cultivated Serbian grower, brewed a few minutes, no milk, honey if you like. It is the most specifically Serbian object in the whole cupboard: a protected plant, from a single strange pyramid mountain, that a whole country quietly believes in. It is also a reminder that "tea culture" does not require a thousand-year ceremony or a porcelain set. Sometimes it just requires a mountain, a law to protect it, and a habit of drinking the thing that grows there.

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