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One Cup and the Coffee Houses of Istanbul
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Show notes
A cup, a house, a ban
Coffee houses opened in Istanbul in the 1550s and within a generation there were hundreds. Starting from a small Iznik cup in a museum drawer, Daniel reconstructs an afternoon inside one: the storytellers, the chess, the gossip, the janissaries, and the sultan who found it all dangerous.
- Where the coffee came from and how it was roasted and served
- Who was allowed in and who was not
- Storytellers, puppet shows and the news before newspapers
- Murad IV's ban and how enforcement actually worked
- The cup's journey: how Ottoman coffee reached Venice and Vienna
With guest historian Ayse Demir of Istanbul University.
Transcript
Welcome back to The Ordinary Centuries. I am Daniel Fortier, and today's object is a coffee cup, small enough to fit in a closed hand, made in Iznik around the year 1600, blue and white, chipped on one side. Somebody drank from it, probably many times, probably in one of the hundreds of coffee houses that had opened in Istanbul since the 1550s. We walk into one of them on an ordinary afternoon. There are storytellers, there is chess, there are soldiers off duty, and there is a great deal of talk about the government, which is why Sultan Murad the Fourth decided the whole business was dangerous and banned it, on pain of death. Then we follow the cup, and the habit, west to Venice and Vienna. My guest is historian Ayse Demir. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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