Fodor's Expert Review Trgovački Kasino

Čakovec's main square, Trg Republike, is a pretty Baroque affair, with a major highlight being the Trgovački Kasino. It's odd that the key gathering place of the town's early-20th-century 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, and curved lines formed by the brickwork working their way to the top. Back in its heyday, this was more than a casino in the gambling sense of the word: besides a card room and a game parlor, it housed a ladies' salon, a reading room, and a dance hall. The building was mostly a trade-union headquarters in the post–World War II era, and its interior is still off-limits to the public. To explore a bit further, just off Trg Republike is Trg Kralja Tomislava, the town's major pedestrian shopping street.