Ottoman Coffee Culture: The Drink That Changed Istanbul

Coffee reached the Ottoman Empire in the mid-16th century, and within a generation it had transformed urban social life. By the 17th 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. The story of how it got there — through the Hejaz and the Yemen, into the households of the elite, and out into the public life of the city — is the subject of this article. R. S. Hattox’s Coffee and Coffeehouses (1985; 3rd ed. 2014) is the indispensable modern account, and I have drawn on it heavily.

Key dates

c. 1420 — First attestation of coffee drinking in Sufi lodges of the Yemen, by the scholar al-Shadhili.
1517 — Ottoman conquest of the Mamluk sultanate brings the Hejaz and the Yemeni coffee trade into the empire.
1534–35 — Ottoman conquest of Iraq; the new drink enters the realm of the imperial administration.
1554 — First public coffeehouse in Istanbul, in the Tahtakale quarter, opened by Hakam of Aleppo and Shams of Damascus.
c. 1570 — Coffee in regular use in the households of the Ottoman elite; the kahvecibaşı becomes a principal officer of the palace.
1633 — The Murad IV crackdown on the coffeehouses; closures are brief and ineffective.
1650s–1680s — Coffeehouses in Venice (1629–1640s), Oxford (1650), London (1652), Marseille (1654), Vienna (1683), and Paris (1689), drawing initial supplies and sometimes training from the Ottoman market.

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 15th 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 traditionally dated to 1554 and 1555.

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 16th century, the coffeehouse had spread to Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, Bursa, Edirne, Thessaloniki, and Baghdad, and by the 17th century it was a fixture of Ottoman urban life. The introduction of coffee reshaped 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 18th-century coffeehouse was the public reading of new printed books, and the early Ottoman printing presses found a major market in the coffeehouse.

“A man of the Ottoman lands, if he be a Muslim, does not drink wine in the public house. He drinks his coffee in the coffeehouse, and there he meets his friends, hears the news, and reads the gazette. The coffeehouse is the diwan of the common people.” — Peçevi, Tarih (c. 1630), on the rise of the Istanbul coffeehouses

Cem Behar’s A Neighborhood in Ottoman Istanbul (2003), a study of the Kasap İlyas mahalle in the 17th century, is the best modern account of how the kahvehane actually worked as a neighborhood institution. Behar is right, in my view, to insist that the coffeehouse is not to be understood as a public “third place” in the Habermasian sense; the Ottoman kahvehane was a working institution of the Muslim male public, and its politics were conducted within a particular set of conventions.

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.

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, under Sultan Murad IV (r. 1623–1640), and was justified on the grounds that the coffeehouses 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; 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 of whether the drink was lawful. 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. Suraiya Faroqhi’s chapter on coffee and consumer goods, in The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It (2004), is the standard modern treatment of the political economy of the suppression.

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 (the dates 1629 and 1640 are both attested, depending on the source), Oxford (1650, the Grand Café in the Angel pub), London (1652, Pasqua Rosée’s Turk’s Head in Cornhill), Marseille (1654), Vienna (1683, the Kolschitzky legend), and Paris (1689, the Procope) — drew their initial supplies from the Ottoman market, and the early European coffeehouses were often staffed by servers trained in the Ottoman manner of brewing and serving.

A note on the modern legacy

By the 19th 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 çay, the black tea of the eastern Black Sea coast, and the modern Turkish drink is now tea. Coffee has never lost its place in the ritual of hospitality, and the small cup of strong, dark, sweet 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.