Imperial Ottoman

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Ottoman Coffee Culture: The Drink That Changed Istanbul

How coffee reached the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century, how it transformed social life, the rise of the coffeehouse, and the place of coffee in Ottoman culture.

Ottoman Coffee Culture

Coffee reached the Ottoman Empire in the mid-sixteenth century, and within a generation it had transformed urban social life. By the seventeenth century, the coffeehouse had become one of the central institutions of Ottoman urban life, and coffee itself had become the empire’s most fashionable drink. This article traces the arrival, the spread, and the social role of coffee in the Ottoman world, and it complements the broader discussions of Ottoman society and culture and of Ottoman cuisine.

Origins and arrival

The coffee plant — Coffea arabica — is native to the highlands of Ethiopia, and the practice of roasting and infusing the beans developed in Yemen in the early fifteenth century. The Ottoman conquest of the Mamluk sultanate in 1517 brought the Hejaz and the Yemeni coffee trade into the empire, and the conquest of Iraq in the 1530s brought the new drink into the realm of the imperial administration. By the 1550s, coffee was being drunk in the households of the Ottoman elite, and the first two public coffeehouses in Istanbul — opened in the Tahtakale and Çöplük areas of the city — are recorded in the early 1560s.

The two merchants traditionally credited with opening the first public coffeehouses in Istanbul are Hakam of Aleppo and Shams of Damascus. By the end of the sixteenth century, the coffeehouse had spread to Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, Bursa, Edirne, Thessaloniki, and Baghdad, and by the seventeenth century it was a fixture of Ottoman urban life. The introduction of coffee is one of the most distinctive events in the broader story of Ottoman cuisine.

The kahvehane

The Ottoman coffeehouse — the kahvehane — was a public establishment in which coffee was prepared and served with sweets, fruit, and tobacco. The typical customer was a man, and the clientele included men of the religious, administrative, military, mercantile, and intellectual classes. The social mix was one of the things that made the coffeehouse politically significant.

The coffeehouse served several functions: it was a place of conversation and sociality, of reading and writing, of business, of artistic performance, and of political discussion. The more elaborate coffeehouses had a meddah (storyteller), a hânende (singer), a saz şairi (poet), a hokkabaz (magician), or a karagözcü (puppeteer of the Karagöz shadow theater) in regular attendance. The principal entertainment of the eighteenth-century coffeehouse was the public reading of new printed books, and the early Ottoman printing presses found a major market in the coffeehouse — a tradition described in the article on Ottoman art and music.

Coffee and the imperial household

Coffee was an important part of the ritual of the imperial household. The kahvecibaşı, the chief of the coffee service, was one of the principal officers of the palace, and the imperial coffee service was carried out in a specific set of vessels: the cezve (small copper pot), the fincan (small porcelain cup), the zarf (metal cup-holder), the tabak (saucer), the şekerlik (sugar bowl), and the kahve değirmeni (hand-mill).

The serving of coffee was a sign of welcome, and the refusal of coffee was a serious breach of etiquette. The formal offering of coffee to the sultan was a ceremony of great precision, and the everyday coffee service of the Ottoman family and the imperial harem is described in the dedicated article on the harem.

Coffeehouses and political authority

The coffeehouse was, from the beginning, a politically significant institution. Sultans and grand viziers were suspicious of the conversation, the poetry, and the political criticism that they generated, and they periodically attempted to close them. The first major crackdown came in 1633, when Sultan Murad IV attempted to suppress the coffeehouses of Istanbul on the grounds that they were centers of sedition. The crackdown failed, and the coffeehouses reopened within a few years. Similar attempts were made in 1650, 1670, 1690, and 1783, and they all failed.

The reasons for the failure are not difficult to understand. The coffeehouse was a profoundly popular institution: the bulk of the urban population, regardless of religion or rank, drank coffee, and the ulema of the empire were divided on the question. The state was also dependent on the income of the coffee trade, and the suppression of the coffeehouses would have meant a substantial loss of revenue.

The coffee trade

The Ottoman coffee trade was a major part of the empire’s economy. The principal sources were the Yemen, the Hejaz, and the East African plantations, and the principal markets were Istanbul, Cairo, Damascus, and Aleppo. The coffee was shipped across the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the desert, and from there distributed across the empire and exported to Europe.

The first European coffeehouses — in Venice (1629), Oxford (1650), London (1652), Marseille (1654), Vienna (1683), and Paris (1689) — drew their initial supplies from the Ottoman market. The first European trading houses all bought their coffee from Ottoman merchants, and the early European coffeehouses were often staffed by Ottoman-trained baristas.

The modern legacy

By the nineteenth century, the coffeehouse had become a central institution of Ottoman urban life, and it remained so until the dissolution of the empire. Coffee, however, was progressively replaced by tea in the late Ottoman period, and the modern Turkish drink is now çay, the black tea of the eastern Black Sea coast. Coffee, however, has never lost its place in the ritual of hospitality, and the small cup of strong, sweet, dark coffee is still the formal offering of welcome in the Turkish household. The broader cultural context is described in the article on Ottoman society and culture.