Coffee may have hastened the Ottoman Empire’s demise
1843magazine.com
1843magazine.com
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.
I agree with the comment above that the article fails to really establish whether the kahvehanes really were unique.
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...
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.
people got together and conspired
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
probably things like mild peer pressure, fitting in with the grown ups, etc, much like smoking, and maybe even drinking.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
Though I was thinking of the caffeination of the workforce. And coffee has more of that than tea.
Some other stimulant containing drink or food.
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.
Sort of reminds me of the short-lived “Freedom Fries” movement in the U.S.
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.
Is that tradition, or just the way you (personally) prepare 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.
Edit: formatting.
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.
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.
Yeah, but if you're a foreigner that would not work.
> And also calling it turkish coffee would seem ok
I'm pretty sure everyone in and around the Balkan peninsula would get the idea.
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.
I'm not sure what that says about us...
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.
Why not? It wouldn't be the first time that a great empire was brought to its knees due to the introduction of something novel.
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."
And why did this coffee-inspired nationalism in the Ottoman Empire just happen to coincide with its emergence in Europe?
So even more likely it was tea than coffee, no?
Therefore people were not only doing conspiracy, they were "learning" at the same time.
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.
This whole "dark roast is bad" thing is really Starbucks fault, since they burn their dark roast for consistency reasons.
https://www.kickinghorsecoffee.com/en/blog/caffeine-myths-da...
https://www.partnerscoffee.com/blogs/news/roasting-and-caffe...
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/exists-demobilise-opp...
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.
Had he never heard of hookahs?
It's a fairly absurd claim that the author makes.
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.
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.
> 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.
Good stuff is available here