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Coffee may have hastened the Ottoman Empire’s demise

142 points by Anon84 7y ago

Jun8 7y ago
For more information about religious fatwa's against coffee use and early adoption see (https://books.google.com/books?id=7CP7fYghBFQC&pg=PA633&lpg=PA633&dq=ahmed+sunbati+fatwa+coffee&source=bl&ots=F8JskkJCa4&sig=ACfU3U2qSicQEG0u7iK_NGWaGTOvw53kxg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiW_-XHtvLlAhXT6Z4KHZm3AR8Q6AEwAXoECAgQAg#v=onepage&q=ahmed%20sunbati%20fatwa%20coffee&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=7CP7fYghBFQC&pg=PA633&lpg=...) 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-reading http://www.turkishstylegroundcoffee.com/turkish-coffee-readi...
- kohtatsu 7y ago
  This guide is gold, thank you.
- aorth 7y ago
  > For more information about religious fatwa's against coffee use and early adoption see (https://books.google.com/books?id=7CP7fYghBFQC&pg=PA633&lpg=PA633&dq=ahmed+sunbati+fatwa+coffee&source=bl&ots=F8JskkJCa4&sig=ACfU3U2qSicQEG0u7iK_NGWaGTOvw53kxg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiW_-XHtvLlAhXT6Z4KHZm3AR8Q6AEwAXoECAgQAg#v=onepage&q=ahmed%20sunbati%20fatwa%20coffee&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=7CP7fYghBFQC&pg=PA633&lpg=...) 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.
  - DrScump 7y ago
    people got together and conspired Hence Charles II's claim that London coffeehouses were nurseries of sedition and rebellion.
    - em-bee 7y ago
      and today the same thing is happening with the internet.
- nautical 7y ago
  "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.
pcmaffey 7y ago
Fun fact: Turkish coffee, Cypriot coffee, and Greek coffee are all exactly the same thing... except perhaps for the ethnicity of the hand serving it.
- bigwheeler 7y ago
  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.
  - egeozcan 7y ago
    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.
- tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago
  Brewing methods vary as well. In Greece you will very rarely find a vendor cooking it in the hot sand. It's usually almost always stove top/burner
- harel 7y ago
  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.
cryptozeus 7y ago
Imo this has nothing to do with coffee itself. It could have very well been some other drink or food that was used as a medium to socialize over.
- Schoolmeister 7y ago
  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.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    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.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    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.
    - sjg007 7y ago
      Why coffee but not tea?
      - petre 7y ago
        Probably coffee made folks hyperactive, eager to spark a revolution rather than just exchange ideas over tea and biscuits. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mW7_wOrZC48 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mW7_wOrZC48
golergka 7y ago
Does the author seriously assume that before coffee, people of the Ottoman empire had no public place for casual gatherings? Had he never heard of hookahs?
- kingofpandora 7y ago
  Or bathhouses? Or mosques? Or gardens? It's a fairly absurd claim that the author makes.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  Tobacco arrived in the Ottoman Empire at around the same time as coffee, so no, hookah-smoking venues were not really around before coffeehouses.
t_mann 7y ago
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.
- jeromebaek 7y ago
  Every article on The Economist gives me this same reaction. Probably because they're a medium of neoliberalism, not legitimate journalism.
- mortenjorck 7y ago
  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.
  - kingofpandora 7y ago
    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.
    - Amygaz 7y ago
      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.
frio 7y ago
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.
coldtea 7y ago
>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...
air7 7y ago
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.
- sjg007 7y ago
  If you mean intense govt crackdowns then yes.
- petre 7y ago
  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.
mirimir 7y ago
> 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.
- Godel_unicode 7y ago
  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. https://www.kickinghorsecoffee.com/en/blog/caffeine-myths-dark-vs-light https://www.kickinghorsecoffee.com/en/blog/caffeine-myths-da... https://www.partnerscoffee.com/blogs/news/roasting-and-caffeine-content https://www.partnerscoffee.com/blogs/news/roasting-and-caffe...
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Well, I use ~40 gm coffee per mug. And if that were dark roast, I'd be adding way too much sugar to make it palatable.
  - senderista 7y ago
    Starbucks dark roast is disgusting, but their blonde roast is just about tolerable.
simula67 7y ago
@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.
- nl 7y ago
  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.
- pvg 7y ago
  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.
- rtpg 7y ago
  I agree with sibling, but: > 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
nl 7y ago
This is ridiculous. 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniots#18th_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniots#18th_century
sn41 7y ago
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.
- macspoofing 7y ago
  >You cannot trivialise an empire that lasted more than 400 years 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.
  - geofft 7y ago
    "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/ 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."
  - 7y ago
kodepareek 7y ago
Turkish author Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red has a lot of scenes set in coffee houses. A running motif in the novel are the (usually short) chapters where a witty voice declaims various interesting ideas/skits/jokes. The religious orthodoxy's campaigns against coffee houses are also an important plot device
0db532a0 7y ago
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.
- sdiq 7y ago
  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.
  - 0db532a0 7y ago
    Yes, c is pronounced as ‘j’ in ‘jacket’.
fasteo 7y ago
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] [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/exists-demobilise-opposition-twitter-fails-arabs-190716080010123.html https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/exists-demobilise-opp...
tugberkk 7y ago
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.

142 points by Anon84 7y ago

Jun8 7y ago

For more information about religious fatwa's against coffee use and early adoption see (https://books.google.com/books?id=7CP7fYghBFQC&pg=PA633&lpg=PA633&dq=ahmed+sunbati+fatwa+coffee&source=bl&ots=F8JskkJCa4&sig=ACfU3U2qSicQEG0u7iK_NGWaGTOvw53kxg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiW_-XHtvLlAhXT6Z4KHZm3AR8Q6AEwAXoECAgQAg#v=onepage&q=ahmed%20sunbati%20fatwa%20coffee&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=7CP7fYghBFQC&pg=PA633&lpg=...) 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-reading http://www.turkishstylegroundcoffee.com/turkish-coffee-readi...

kohtatsu 7y ago
This guide is gold, thank you.
aorth 7y ago
> For more information about religious fatwa's against coffee use and early adoption see (https://books.google.com/books?id=7CP7fYghBFQC&pg=PA633&lpg=PA633&dq=ahmed+sunbati+fatwa+coffee&source=bl&ots=F8JskkJCa4&sig=ACfU3U2qSicQEG0u7iK_NGWaGTOvw53kxg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiW_-XHtvLlAhXT6Z4KHZm3AR8Q6AEwAXoECAgQAg#v=onepage&q=ahmed%20sunbati%20fatwa%20coffee&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=7CP7fYghBFQC&pg=PA633&lpg=...) 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.
- DrScump 7y ago
  people got together and conspired Hence Charles II's claim that London coffeehouses were nurseries of sedition and rebellion.
  - em-bee 7y ago
    and today the same thing is happening with the internet.
nautical 7y ago
"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.

pcmaffey 7y ago

Fun fact: Turkish coffee, Cypriot coffee, and Greek coffee are all exactly the same thing... except perhaps for the ethnicity of the hand serving it.

bigwheeler 7y ago
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.
- egeozcan 7y ago
  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.
tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago
Brewing methods vary as well. In Greece you will very rarely find a vendor cooking it in the hot sand. It's usually almost always stove top/burner
harel 7y ago
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.

cryptozeus 7y ago

Imo this has nothing to do with coffee itself. It could have very well been some other drink or food that was used as a medium to socialize over.

Schoolmeister 7y ago
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.
- coldtea 7y ago
  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.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  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.
  - sjg007 7y ago
    Why coffee but not tea?
    - petre 7y ago
      Probably coffee made folks hyperactive, eager to spark a revolution rather than just exchange ideas over tea and biscuits. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mW7_wOrZC48 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mW7_wOrZC48

golergka 7y ago

Does the author seriously assume that before coffee, people of the Ottoman empire had no public place for casual gatherings? Had he never heard of hookahs?

kingofpandora 7y ago
Or bathhouses? Or mosques? Or gardens? It's a fairly absurd claim that the author makes.
Mediterraneo10 7y ago
Tobacco arrived in the Ottoman Empire at around the same time as coffee, so no, hookah-smoking venues were not really around before coffeehouses.

t_mann 7y ago

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.

jeromebaek 7y ago
Every article on The Economist gives me this same reaction. Probably because they're a medium of neoliberalism, not legitimate journalism.
mortenjorck 7y ago
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.
- kingofpandora 7y ago
  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.
  - Amygaz 7y ago
    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.

frio 7y ago

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.

coldtea 7y ago

>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...

air7 7y ago

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.

sjg007 7y ago
If you mean intense govt crackdowns then yes.
petre 7y ago
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.

mirimir 7y ago

> 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.

Godel_unicode 7y ago
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. https://www.kickinghorsecoffee.com/en/blog/caffeine-myths-dark-vs-light https://www.kickinghorsecoffee.com/en/blog/caffeine-myths-da... https://www.partnerscoffee.com/blogs/news/roasting-and-caffeine-content https://www.partnerscoffee.com/blogs/news/roasting-and-caffe...
- mirimir 7y ago
  Well, I use ~40 gm coffee per mug. And if that were dark roast, I'd be adding way too much sugar to make it palatable.
- senderista 7y ago
  Starbucks dark roast is disgusting, but their blonde roast is just about tolerable.

simula67 7y ago

@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.

nl 7y ago
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.
pvg 7y ago
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.
rtpg 7y ago
I agree with sibling, but: > 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

nl 7y ago

This is ridiculous. 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniots#18th_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniots#18th_century

sn41 7y ago

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.

macspoofing 7y ago
>You cannot trivialise an empire that lasted more than 400 years 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.
- geofft 7y ago
  "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/ 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."
- 7y ago

kodepareek 7y ago

Turkish author Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red has a lot of scenes set in coffee houses. A running motif in the novel are the (usually short) chapters where a witty voice declaims various interesting ideas/skits/jokes. The religious orthodoxy's campaigns against coffee houses are also an important plot device

0db532a0 7y ago

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.

sdiq 7y ago
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.
- 0db532a0 7y ago
  Yes, c is pronounced as ‘j’ in ‘jacket’.

fasteo 7y ago

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] [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/exists-demobilise-opposition-twitter-fails-arabs-190716080010123.html https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/exists-demobilise-opp...

tugberkk 7y ago

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.