Cafés in Türkiye Istanbul

How coffee reached the Ottoman capital

Turkish sources tell two arrival stories. In one, Özdemir Paşa, the Ottoman governor of Yemen, took a liking to coffee there and brought it to Istanbul.⁶ In the other, the chronicler Peçevi dates its arrival to the Hijri year 962, or 1554–55, and writes that until then there was neither coffee nor a coffeehouse in Istanbul or anywhere in the realm.⁷ Then Hakem of Aleppo and Şems of Damascus opened large shops in Tahtakale and started selling it.⁷

The palace took to it early. Suleiman the Magnificent kept a kahvecibaşı, a chief coffee-maker, and later sultans kept the post.⁸ Others tried to stamp it out. Murad IV abolished coffeehouses in 1633 and had keepers cudgelled for a first offence, but the bans came and went, were often ignored and left no lasting mark on how much coffee people drank.⁸⁹

The kahvehane: news, spies and a salted cup

The kahvehane (coffeehouse) was where news traveled, which made rulers nervous. Muslims owned 95% of the coffeehouses and Janissaries 42% of those, and between 1840 and 1845 spies filed weekly reports to the police on the opinions they overheard.⁹ Ottoman miniatures show a meddah, a storyteller, performing to the room.⁹

UNESCO still names the coffeehouse as the main place Turkish coffee is drunk, for conversation, news and reading, while the know-how of making it passes informally within families.¹ One family custom belongs to engagements: the bride-to-be sometimes puts salt instead of sugar in the groom's coffee, to gauge his character.⁸

Dibek, mırra and menengiç

The cezve (coffee pot) is only one way to make it. Dibek coffee is named after the stone mortar in which roasted beans are crushed to a coarser grind.⁸ In the south and along the Syrian border, in Adana, Gaziantep, Mardin, Mersin and Şanlıurfa, people drink mırra, from the Arabic for bitter: beans boiled again and again, strained in stages, sometimes spiced with cardamom and never sweetened.¹⁰

Mırra comes in a handleless cup, about half full, served from the oldest guest to the youngest.¹⁰ Folk tales say a guest who sets the empty cup down instead of handing it back must fill it with gold, marry the server, arrange the server's marriage or furnish the trousseau.¹⁰ Menengiç kahvesi is brewed not from coffee beans but from the dried, roasted fruit of the terebinth tree, Pistacia terebinthus; Gaziantep counts as its home, and milk can replace the water.¹¹

Rize and the state tea company

Tea is a 20th-century crop here. Law No. 407 of 1924 gave tea growing legal footing in Rize and Borçka, with the agricultural inspector Zihni Derin in charge; the first fresh leaves were harvested in 1938, and a 1940 tea law put new plantations under state license.¹² Rize's first tea factory opened in 1947.⁴

In 2024 Türkiye produced 1.4 million tonnes of fresh leaf, 67.7% of it in Rize province, and ÇAYKUR, the state tea company, bought 54% of the harvest.¹³ FAO data for 2023 rank the country sixth in the world for dry tea, after China, India, Kenya, Vietnam and Sri Lanka.¹³ ÇAYKUR runs 49 leaf-processing factories along the eastern Black Sea coast.¹²

Istanbul, from the cezve to the roaster

Istanbul holds every stage of this story within a ferry ride: coffee merchants around Eminönü, tea gardens in Sultanahmet and Moda, and specialty roasters in Karaköy and in Kadıköy on the Asian shore. In October 2013 the city hosted the fifth World Cezve/Ibrik Championship, for coffee brewed the Turkish way, and Turgay Yildizli of Türkiye won it with 468 points.¹⁴