[1] In the late 1890s, during the Obrenović royal house rule—specifically King Alexander I's—in the Kingdom of Serbia, the empty plot of land at Terazije where Hotel Moskva is located today, was sold cheaply by the Belgrade municipal authorities to local merchant Boško Tadić.

[2] The brothers quickly turned the family house into an inn, eventually naming it Velika Srbija—reportedly after the eponymous informal co-operative made up of regular guests from the Marjanovićs' other kafanas.

[3] By 1902, the Marjanovićs sold the inn to merchants Mitar Vranković and Nikola Vučković who in 1904 flipped it to Svetozar Vukadinović, former director of the Serbian Shipbuilding Company who had just returned to Serbia following an exile of sorts.

Born in 1860 in Novi Sad, Austria-Hungary in a staunchly nationalist Serb household of priest Jevtimije "Jevta" Vukadinović, young Svetozar moved across the border into Serbia where he became an administrator in various shipbuilding companies before being forced into exile due to running afoul of King Milan I Obrenović's pro-Austrian economic policies.

[7] Right away, the project ran into unexpected problems when it was discovered that the soil under the Velika Srbija inn is full of hardened loam as well as underground springs and subterranean streams, creating additional budgetary needs.

[9] Ilkić's design employed a Secessionist style with skillfully incorporated ancient Greek elements, quite daring for that time, giving Belgrade—a city of around 70,000 inhabitants—a modern face during the transformation it was undergoing at the turn of the century.

[12] Another part of the opening ceremony was held three days later on Friday, the 17th of January with the King's Guard, the Royal Serbian Army's most elite unit, staging a concert.

In addition to Hotel Moskva, the palace housed a kafana, an exclusive restaurant serving specialties from the French and Serbian cuisines,[11] numerous apartments for rent, and the Rossiya insurance company's Belgrade branch headed by Svetozar Vukadinović.

[9] The palace was also a significant political statement, providing yet another example of King Peter I Karađorđević's and prime minister Nikola Pašić's turning of Serbia's foreign and economic policies towards the Russian Empire and away from Austria-Hungary.

[9] Its opening took place in the middle of the so-called Pig War, a bitter economic showdown initiated by the Austro-Hungarian imposition of a customs blockade on the import of Serbian pork, Serbia's chief export at the time.

[15] Being a Narodna Odbrana member as well as a Novo vreme correspondent, famous Serbian poet Jovan Dučić spent a lot of time at the Rossiya palace.

The 18 December 1909 Novo vreme issue wrote of an incident in Hotel Moskva's lobby that saw Dučić punch Rista Odavić [sr], a professor at one of Belgrade's gymnasia.

Arriving in 1919 to a war-ravaged city that still didn't have a fully restored electrical grid and water supply, novelist Miloš Crnjanski described Belgrade as being "wrecked and ugly—full of holes, ruins, weeds, uncertainty, sensational political events, and returning writers from all corners of the world".

Crnjanski proceeded to establish Grupa umetnika, a small but enthusiastic collective of writers, painters, and musicians eager to provide the city with a new beginning in art and culture.

[19] They did not form a coherent school or movement, but their meetings, discussions, and polemics over the nature of art provided an engaging and stimulating atmosphere for a younger generation of Modernist writers amidst the Belgrade post-World War I ruins.

However, two years later in 1939, the newly passed Belgrade general urbanistic plan restored the 1923 project by architect Nikola Dobrović who also envisioned a park, but without demolishing the hotels.

[11] All throughout World War II, the headquarters had their own power generators and even water sources independent of the city supply in addition to elevators and wide basement facilities.

[25] Among the various additions, he adorned the building's hallways with stained glass featuring motifs from Russian fairytales as well as stone mosaics with personal impressions and memories of Moscow and Russia before immigration to Yugoslavia.

Among the various cakes introduced on the occasion was Moskva šnit [sr], a fruitcake containing almonds, sour cherries, pineapple, and Petit-Beurre,[27] that quickly became popular and remains one of hotel's staples until present day.

[27] As reported in early 2015, every day a piece of Moskva šnit gets ordered by between 200 and 300 patrons of the hotel's restaurant while some one thousand whole cakes get delivered monthly to home addresses.

[27] In August 2005, the hotel's umbrella legal entity, state-owned Moskva a.d.,[28] had its 82.83% purchased by the Belize-based off-shore investment fund Netwest Finance represented by Serbian businessman Mile Dragić[29] for €11 million.

[11] Throughout 2009 and 2010, four years after its re-privatization, the hotel finally underwent extensive renovation — from April until September 2009, the side facing Balkanska Street was refurbished, both internally and externally, with new furniture, wallpaper, drapes, curtains, bathrooms, flooring, and electronic locks.

At one point, one of the main characters decides to take a peek into Hotel Moskva's kafana where, as he says with contempt, "wet tobacco is smoked" and "Byzantine intrigues are drawn up".

Klopka, a 2007 neo-noir film set in the post-Milošević Serbia exploring how far is a financially strapped father willing to go in order to come up with funds for his ill child's surgery, features a key scene in Hotel Moskva's cafe where the mysterious man played by Miki Manojlović makes an offer to the sick child's father played by Nebojša Glogovac of paying for his son's surgery in return for the man carrying out an assassination.