The Story of Coffee: How 'Satan's Drink" Spread across Europe via the Ottomans

 This was the scent that intrigued me: the scent of a weekend with both parents in the room and the scent of conversation and laughter. However, while both calming and stimulating for your senses, this was not necessary; it is the sharing experience and the sense of community of it that kept me within its grasp.

Like I love its connections to business however, the earliest traces of drinking coffee reveal the fact that it was performed outside of the home. Coffee shops are an essential part to European society, (Viennese kaffeehauser have been classified as to be an irreplaceable cultural heritage item through UNESCO) Europeans as well as Italians and Greeks are owed their unique traditions of coffee to the shared experience of with the Mediterranean together with Arab as well as African worlds.

Coffee was once thought to be unusual and was even considered to be the most Eastern thing and a'strange thing' in the Orientalist method that is a way of being and an official endorsement of the pope Clement VIII was required in the year 1600 to dispel coffee's shady associations. According to some sources, his advisors pressured him discredit the beverage, referring to it as " a bitter invention of Satan." Upon trying it for himself and tasting it, he was believed to have said " This devil's drink is yummy... we ought to betray the devil by baptizing this drink!"

In 1889, the Emperor Menilek II of Ethiopia, from where coffee seeds Coffea dried, roasted, and ground into coffee, come from was described as an Ethiopian drink (originating around the year 850 AD) which is being a Christian drink in spite of that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church ban on coffee during the 12 century. century..

From Ethiopia coffee beans swiftly expanded with the help of Yemeni traders, who traveled to Mecca as well as Medina, Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad and finally Istanbul (after the fall of Constantinople). Two travelers of Aleppo and Damascus were said to have founded the first cafe located in Istanbul. It was so well-known that it expanded to in the East Indies, Indonesia and into the Americas.

In the beginning it was even a problem in the Muslim world, coffee was thought to be as a stimulant, and therefore was forbidden by imams in an Islamic court at Mecca around 1511. Their main concern was however the political opinions that were exchanged in coffee houses, and the risk of these conversations in opposition to the current system. Thirteen years later, Suleiman I, the Ottoman Turkish Sultan, Suleiman I (the Magnificent) was able to order the ban to overturned, as the hot drink was extremely well-known. According to a local saying, Turkish coffee should be " black as hell strong as death with a sweet taste as sweet love"

Coffee house scene Istanbul 1905.

Coffee houses were a hub to gather for news, politics and even intellectual thoughts expressed with hot coffee and table games like Backgammon (tavla) as well as checkers and Chess. When you walk through small towns in the old Ottoman districts, you'll see a myriad of cafes, but the most common is a single one that is located in the center of the town that overlooks the main buildings, maybe that of the marketplace, or more often the principal mosque, political establishment, or church. Coffee homes were places where people could sit (the establishments were only exclusively for men) and discuss the political issues of the city, watching people do their day-to-day tasks.

In Europe coffee culture emerged in the late 1800s; Paris and Vienna were the first cities to be introduced to the drink in a variety of ways and by the Ottomans.

Then, in Paris, Suleiman Aga, one of the Ottoman ambassador to French King Louis XIV, held lavish celebrations while in Paris for official business. and introduced Parisian society to Turkish culture as well as coffee. The first French cafe Cafe Procope, which was the first French coffee shop Café Procope began operations in 1689.

The first time that Vienna had a taste of it was slightly different story. The tale is that mysterious sacks that contained green beans were hidden after it was discovered that the Ottomans were defeated during the Battle of Vienna in 1683. The beans were not recognized as what they really were, believing that they served as food to camels. The Polish birthed spy from Ruthenian descendance who was fluent in a variety of languages and dialects, including Turkish and Turkish, was the first person to recognize the value of beans and what they actually were. Some have suggested that this infamous spy was actually was a Serb in the sense that his time spent during his time in Belgrade and Istanbul and was a spy for his fellow soldiers in the Turkish military. Some argue that it was an Armenian spy who established the first coffee shop in Vienna. However, both men were said to have added sweeteners and cream for sweetness to "soften" the bitter flavor.

As with many other things, the rich drink and coffee tradition of Europe that is so important to its identity was not born in the European continent. Its roots lie in East Africa, coffee spread across north Africa as well as across the Middle East, establishing itself as the ' Nectar of Poets prior to when it was accepted in Europe in its place as their own. The irony of the Ottomans who were the greatest historical "foe", who brought Europe into what was to later become an amazing love affair is not to be ignored.