The article doesn’t seem to deliver on its headline. It seems plausible that urbanisation, economic growth and the emergence of a wealthy class with sufficient leisure time to hang out and discuss might also have had something to do with the spread of ideas about political freedoms. The article doesn’t touch on these at all, and doesn’t provide a compelling reason why the mentioned historic events wouldn’t have occurred without coffee. It seems more like a spurious correlation.
My reading of the article is that the missing piece from all that you mention was the right kind of “third place” for people to assemble outside their places of work, yet away from their homes.
In other cultures, that might have been an ale house. But with the prohibition on alcohol in the region’s majority faith, it would appear there was nothing comparable until a beverage-based drug with socially acceptable effects gained a foothold and a market arose of social spaces serving it.
Why not the church or mosque (especially mosques with their open courtyards)? Or the every-present bathhouses which spread right through the Middle East, Anatloia and the Balkans?
I agree with the comment above that the article fails to really establish whether the kahvehanes really were unique.
Your observations about ‘why not this!’ support OP:
Religious place aren’t typically a place where people meet casually to scheme some new social structure that would weaken its clergy and royalty.
Bathhouses aren’t exactly discrete or quiet. You can’t really have a conversation in there without anyone else listening. Plus there is function to it, it’s not just a casual place to meet and greet.
One interesting thing about coffee culture in Turkey is the tradition of "fortune telling": After one finishes their coffee the cup is turned upside down on the saucer and waits for 5-10 minutes. Then, the shapes that the grounds make in the cup and the saucer is interpreted, usually for fun. For more info: http://www.turkishstylegroundcoffee.com/turkish-coffee-readi...
"Coffee houses gave men somewhere to congregate other than in homes, mosques or markets, providing a place for them to socialise, exchange information, entertain – and be educated. Literate members of society read aloud the news of the day; janissaries, members of an elite cadre of Ottoman troops, planned acts of protest against the Sultan"
This feels like blaming coffee for people socializing (in todays world this would mean social networking websites, where people hang out). Its sort of saying (in hypothetical world) Twitter lead to downfall of China.
Which I think is debatable.
Excellent resource! It's an anecdote, but once I heard that governments criminalized coffee more readily than alcohol because people got together and conspired. In the case of alcohol the conspirators forgot what they had talked about by the morning, but with coffee they did not. Your source seems to hint at that as well:
> The fact that current politics were discussed in the coffee-houses, the government's acts criticised and intrigues woven, was the principal cause for the intervention of the authorities.
>Ethnic groups in European regions of the empire with an Eastern Orthodox Christian majority started agitating for independence. Nationalist leaders planned their tactics and cemented alliances in the coffee houses of Thessaloniki, Sofia and Belgrade. Their caffeine-fuelled efforts succeeded with the establishment of an independent Greece in 1821, Serbia in 1835, and Bulgaria in 1878. The reign of kahve was over.
Those things (the rise of nation states) would have happened with, or without the coffee, as they happened all around central and western Europe as well even earlier, and in the 20th century, all around the world.
There were several factors for that, including the rise of national awareness, easier promotion of such causes through typography, the decline of the Ottoman empire itself (the "Sick man of Europe" as it was called at the time), and the plain old fact that many regional majorities, especially Christians, were ruled over as second class citizens...
An interesting similarity can be drawn to today's digital social network. The main idea of the article is that coffee created cafe culture which in turn created a shift in the way people interacted and eased the exchange of ideas that eventually helped fuel the effort that led to fall of the empire.
In a way, Facebook created a
a similar shift in the way people communicate and made exchange of ideas easier. And this, arguable, has already supported several major real-world changes such as the Arab Spring, US election meddling, etc.
You forgot about Sri Lanka sectarian violence. If coffee (or tea) eases the exchange of ideas, social media eases the exchange and amplification of outrage.
Yes, but nowhere is it implied that it is because of something inherent to coffee. It probably could have been another delicious drink, like hot chocolate. That doesn't diminish the content of this article though.
It didn't have to do with the "gathering to enjoy a beverage" (whether coffee or whatever else it could be in its places) either. There were dozens of forces at play to the dissolution of the Ottoman empire. Coffee was hardly any major factor.
First such cities didn't have any lack of places to socialize (and potentially conspire), for milenia before coffee houses.
Second, the same things (nation building, empire dissolutions, revolutions) happened all around Europe and shortly all around the world from the 18th to 20th century, whether they had a coffeehouse culture or not.
The thing with coffee isn't that it's delicious. It's actually quite hard to make it palatable.
But coffee is (1) addictive, and (2) induces wakefulness and action.
I've seen loose theories that coffee was the real reason for the Industrial Revolution. It's not hard to imagine the extra energy it produces to also go into political efforts.
> The thing with coffee isn't that it's delicious. It's actually quite hard to make it palatable
This is like saying it's hard to make chocolate, tea, or many other ultra-popular foods/drinks palatable.
Step 1 of 1: add sweetener. Not hard at all.
Many people (including me) would argue that coffee is delicious without sweetener, though. Perhaps you don't understand how people like it, but that's far from a universal opinion.
My theory/speculation is that if you consume something that tastes badly but makes you feel good, the human body will over time translate the expectation into "this tastes good".
Maybe that's part of how addiction works. Maybe that explains "acquired tastes". And maybe my uneducated guess is completely wrong :)
i never liked coffee. the addiction and wakefulness it induces takes more than one cup. but i was turned off from coffee after just having one sip. so i suspect that there must be more to it than that and that i simply don't understand how people like it.
probably things like mild peer pressure, fitting in with the grown ups, etc, much like smoking, and maybe even drinking.
I don't totally understand what you're trying to say, but again: some people enjoy black coffee, smoking, and alcohol just on their own.
Yes, social factors increase usage of all these things and people will force themselves to do it, but that's not universal.
I also love the flavor of smoking tobacco products (including cigarettes), although I only smoke a few times a year for social, health, and convenience reasons.
the point is, addiction and side effects only take hold after consuming coffee for a while. for someone who doesn't like coffee there is a low risk of getting addicted. therefore there either must be people who do like coffee as it is or they are pushed by some form of peer pressure.
obviously, tastes vary strongly, so both groups must exist.
in my case i escape the peer pressure by discovering that strong coffee actually made me sick, and i used that as an excuse to reject coffee even in situations where it was considered impolite to reject an offer when i was visiting people.
I used to be you. I hated the flavor of coffee, and I also didn't want to be addicted.
Now I've "matured" and realized coffee is a drug. Or, if you will, a medicine. You don't take medicine because it tastes good, but because the effects are, on balance, good for you.
That's funny, I've heard that tea was a potential contributor. The theory goes that the health benefits of drinking tea allowed our British cities to grow larger without disease spreading. This meant more people congregating in one place, which allowed a greater exchange of ideas. Something along those lines.
The Ottoman empire was a huge, multi-ethinic and multi-religous empire and the amazing thing is that is stayed together as long as it did.
Saying the the Greeks, the Bulgarians and the Serbians revolts succeeded because of caffeine ignores the long history of revolts which at time were moderately successful for a while. For example, in the 1770s there was a Greek revolt which led to partial de-facto independence of Laconia for many years[1].
The bigger difference after the 1820s was the interest of the great European powers in supporting these movements. With Great Britain, France and Russia all supporting these revolutions militarly it would have been surprising if they hadn't succeeded.
That's true. Turkish coffee is the most political coffee there is. In Israel, it's a national drink (and referred to as Turkish coffee, no appropriation on that one). However, there is a proper version and a lazy version. The proper one is where one would cook the coffee on a hob. Takes some time and care. The lazy one, which I sin with 3-4 times every day, is a a heaped spoon at the bottom of a glass (never china/porcelain, and usually larger than a proper turkish coffee cup), hot water on top and a hefty mix. Quick, dirty and hits so many spots I can't even begin to imagine life without it.
I have never heard of that lazy version. Here is how probably most Bosnian families would do it:
- Grind coffee beans as fine as you can, much finer than for espresso
- in the meantime, make sure to boil your water and then put it aside.
- heat up the džezva (turk: cezve) slowly for a few seconds (so that water that is poured in
does not cool down too quickly)
- take 9g of coffee powder per cup and put it into your džezva. You can vary the amount to your
likings. I take 18g of coffee for around 360ml of water.
- with the džezva still on the hot plate pour around 1/3 of the water slowly into the džezva.
The water turns into a foamy dark liquid. Gently adjust temperature so that the liquid is slowly
heated. This will make it rise due to the foam on top.
- Let it rise to about 2/3 of the džezva. Remove džezva from the plate, let the coffee set a
little (to about 1/2).
- Pour more water into the coffee, again to 2/3 of the džezva
- put džezva back on plate, heat it up and let the coffee rise to 1/1 of the džezva
- remove from plate, slowly fill with water until the level is back to 1/1 (foamy liquid is
setting again and will allow you to add more water)
Your coffee is ready to serve. Serve in fildžan or small cups.
What was the name of coffee in Bosnia historically? I can't believe it wasn't "Turkish coffee". I would expect that the name "Bosnian coffee" (that the article claims is now used) is something very recent (something similar to what
bigwheeler here writes about "Greek" coffee). Is the name even really used?
Btw, the proper formatting here is to separate paragraphs with an empty line and to remove all leading spaces in front of every paragraph, to avoid the text being treated as the source code.
I was there recently and visited Sarajevo and actualy faced this as a real world problem: wanted to order bosnian coffee in a restaurant but was kind of unable to express myself.
If you order coffee (kahva/kafa) in Bosnia nowadays, you are likely to get whatever comes out of the machine installed at the bar.
To get the real deal I had to order using one of these expressions:
domaća kafa/kahva (homeland coffee? native coffee?)
naša kafa/kahva (translates to "our coffee")
or
bosanska kafa.
However, traditionally I guess coffee was just called kahva/kafa as it probably was not distingueshed between the verious forms of preparation. And also calling it turkish coffee would seem ok, as the whole area is highly influenced by (ancient) Turkey, not only linguistically.
Well, it's not an official tradition but it's just an acceptable norm to serve Turkish coffee in a glass, and not a mug or china. Personally I find the feel and taste (if that makes sense) of glass superior to mugs/china as far as Turkish coffee goes. I don't mind other drinks (including other forms of coffee) in mugs. Just not Turkish. I'm a bit of a Coffee fanatic, but even casual drinkers will opt for glass in Israel. Can't explain it logically.
And while we're on the subject, after plenty of research, I found Bourbon Espresso blend (medium-dark roast), ground to Turkish is the perfect blend for me. In the UK i buy a kilo every two weeks from Wittard of Chelsea who kindly grind it to perfection for me. I find this blend superior to store bought packaged Turkish/Greek coffee and being ground from fresh beans makes a big difference.
This is somewhat true. As I understand it, it was called Turkish Coffee everywhere, including Greece, up until the conflict between Turkey and Greece in Cyprus. As a result, Greece began to discourage the use of Turkish anything, but they weren’t about to give up their coffee!
Sort of reminds me of the short-lived “Freedom Fries” movement in the U.S.
It makes sense to create a new identity for the imported stuff if it's going to sell better.
Also goes the other way: Last time I was in Greece, I've also seen a lot of restaurants offering Turkish Breakfast. I was intrigued and asked a waiter why the name. He said that it sells much better to the Turkish tourists (me included, haha), of which there were many in the area.
And sometimes the dish changes while the name interestingly hangs on: Döner in Germany, Döner in Turkey and Donair in Halifax/Canada. Only similarity is the form of the meat but presentation/taste is totally different. They are practically different dishes. I'd have also said döner in Greece which is prepared with pork meat but it got renamed to Gyros if I'm not mistaken.
Especially Middle East and Eurasia, including the Balkans, have such culture trades in every direction imaginable.
This is a fairly ridiculous premise. You cannot trivialise an empire that lasted more than 400 years and held together one of the most fractious region on earth (look at what happened after the Ottomans) and say that it was so brittle that a drink could bring it down. Very few empires in history last that long.
It may just be that other regions went ahead in historical pace. Even with all the outpacing, battles like Gallipoli (which is the basis of the Anzac Day in Australia and NZ) show that Ottomans were a force to be reckoned with, even in their twilight.
Just like pop science, pop history is also a form of spam.
Around the time people started drinking coffee instead of beer,lots of changes in art, math, and science began to happen. To use a phrase from startup culture, coffee was very disruptive.
A lot of things were happening in that (very long) period, most of them with a much more obvious connection to changes in learning and culture than coffee. A connection would require better evidence than contemporaneity.
Is it really one of the most fractious regions on earth? For about 2000 years, it was controlled by as few as one as many as 3 major powers. The imperialism -> nationalism transition has gone poorly most places that are neither the successor state of imperial powers nor new empires.
"Overt catastrophic failure occurs when small, apparently innocuous failures join to create opportunity for a systemic accident. Each of these small failures is necessary to cause catastrophe but only the combination is sufficient to permit failure. ... complex systems run as broken systems. The system continues to function because it contains so many redundancies and because people can make it function, despite the presence of many flaws."https://how.complexsystems.fail/
This is as true for empires as it is for your distributed monolith on Kubernetes. A forgotten cup of coffee might be what actually causes a replication alert to be missed that brings everything to its knees, but if it was, the system was on the verge of failing, anyway. Robust systems can suffer many missed alerts without falling over.
Put another way: for want of a nail, and for a systematic lack of maintenance of the other nails, the shoe was lost. For want of a horse, which could have been provided by the local stables which were somehow also not in operation, the rider was lost. For want of a message which should have been sent by multiple riders if it was that important, the battle was lost. No lessons on how to hold a kingdom together can be learned from a postmortem process that says, "Root cause: want of a nail."
How novel was coffee though really? Tea is the real drink of the Middle East and if coffee was really that of a distabling influence, why did it take several hundred years for the effect to take hold?
And why did this coffee-inspired nationalism in the Ottoman Empire just happen to coincide with its emergence in Europe?
Tea did not take off in the Ottoman Empire until the 19th century. While yes, now tea has utterly eclipsed coffee in Turkey as the everyday beverage, it is actually a pretty recent introduction.
Somewhat true. Of course, this is a headline and it is a little exaggerated, however as I said, somewhat true. But I would like to correct something as a Turkish. These places were also called "kiraathane". -hane is "house". Kahvehane means coffee house, kiraathane means kiraat house. The word "kiraat" means "to read".
Therefore people were not only doing conspiracy, they were "learning" at the same time.
> Even when taken sade, or plain, the flavour profile depends on the roast; the medium-to-darker beans of the Turkish variety produce coffee with an earthy taste, smoky notes and thick texture. When you drain your cup, you will see fine grains coating the bottom. The effects soon hit. Emperors of the world, beware.
It's my understanding that lighter roasts have more caffeine, because it gets destroyed at high temperatures. Also, lighter roasts are more palatable when made very strong. Or conversely, darker roasts taste OK when made weaker.
There's no change in caffeine content with different roasts, this is a popular myth. Also, properly roasted dark roasts are much better (where better means richer and more complex) than light roasts, as the maillard reaction has been allowed to do it's magic more fully than under-roasted (or light roast) coffee. Most coffee specialty roasters sell far more City or Italian roast than light roasts.
This whole "dark roast is bad" thing is really Starbucks fault, since they burn their dark roast for consistency reasons.
I have no knowledge about Ottoman Empire history, but my immediate thought after finishing reading was "This makes sense, maybe not as-is, but as an important contributing factor", and Twitter came to my mind as the new coffee shop [1]
A couple of interesting facts related to the article:
1. The arabic word "finjan" adapted to "fincan" in Turkish means cup, as in the type of vessel used for any type of coffee, not only kahve. The "fincan" may have a handle.
2. Greeks are not the only ones to use mastic in their kahve. Some Turkish people not necessarily of Greek descent add it to their kahve and many other things.
I am not Turkish and neither write nor speak the language, however, based on how i see the Erdogan's first name with a 'c' ia pronounced, the two words are probably pronounced the same i.e. 'finjan'. I am Somali and we used to use the same word for a vessel bigger than a cup. I don't see people use the same nowadays tho.
There's a book called The Devil's Cup, which is one of those travel/history hybrids, that follows along with a similar tale. It feels a bit cavalier with the facts; it has a hypothesis and seeks to prove that out rather than disprove it -- but it's an interesting read nonetheless.
@Dang, can we have a rule about editing away clickbaity headlines?
The story here seems to be: coffee shops allowed people another venue to socialize and challenge existing power structures.
There is nothing special about Turkish coffee and coffee may not even have been important. As people got educated and had more free time, they may have found other venues to communicate and exchange ideas. 'Increasing leisure time and freedom destroyed an autocratic empire' may be a more accurate and still interesting headline that takes the discussion away from complaints about the headline.
> As people got educated and had more free time, they may have found other venues to communicate and exchange ideas.
The point is that in this particular case it was the coffee shops. They were popular, they were profitable, they were lead by “literate people” (something to think about).
It’s interesting to think about why this thing happened in these kinds of places. There are other examples of revolutions instead being triggered from religious places, from work places, from battlefields... the “non-uniqueness” is debatable.
Even just the tidbit about state power being unable to outright shut these down. There are so many axes you can go down when thinking about it. There’s the power struggle itself, both between state and capital and between state and the people (which ones though?). There are difficulties of empire. There’s so much.
There is already such a rule. If you think the title is bad and/or have a better one, just email the mods. I'm not sure 'provocative' or even 'factually wrong' is really the sort of thing the rules are trying to address, though.
Except that Increasing leisure time and freedom destroyed an autocratic empire isn't what the article says, and autocratic seems editorialising hugely (the Ottoman empire was no more autocratic than other empires and in many ways less so).
I think your complain here is that the article is wrong. That has little to do with the headline, which summarises the article's argument quite well.
