It is a well-known conversation starter, an indispensable drink that marks the ceremony of asking for a girl’s hand in marriage: bountifully bubbly Turkish coffee, that wonderful mix of boiling water and a handful of ground coffee beans.
Turkey encountered coffee for the first time in 1554. We must have really loved it, too, because shortly after we met it and started to make it, “Turkish coffee” began to be known all over the world. In fact, Turks felt so strongly about the coffee that came in from Yemen that in the early 1600s advisers urged Pope Clement VIII to ban it as a Muslim drink, but he refused, “baptizing” it instead. But, of course, it is not only coffee that remains in our memories from those days to today. It is the way it can be drunk, too: Turkish coffee simply cannot be had in a large mug, or the wrong kind of cup. It has its own specific way of being served, and its own kind of cups, too. Turkish coffee and its pleasures had their own specific rules during Ottoman times. The hot drink would be served up in very delicate and elegant cups, and with the kind of ceremony that suited such attention to aesthetic detail.
And so, Galeri Set Osmanlı in Mısır Çarşısı (Egyptian or Spice Bazaar) brings us these traces of the old ways to drink Turkish coffee. “Our Turkish coffee cups will take you on a journey into the depths of history,” says Galeri Set Osmanlı’s coffee cup expert, Uğur Atik. And it’s not just Turks who head off on this journey. Uğur Bey notes that he has sold these special cups not only to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and President Abdullah Gül, but also to a wide range of foreign statesmen and artists. Some of these include names like Queen Elizabeth II, former US President George W. Bush, Fidel Castro, the Jordanian royalty, a Saudi Arabian prince, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and actors such as Kevin Costner. Middle East expert Hüsnü Mahalli picked up a set of six dark blue coffee cups here before a visit to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to give him as a gift. As for Queen Elizabeth II, she bought pink and turquoise coffee cups. When the queen’s attendants later visited the shop, they said she had especially liked the pink-colored cups. “We make our products with great care and love, and transport our feelings across the oceans,” explains Uğur Bey.
Galeri Set Osmanlı produces the most select examples from the 16th and 19th century Turkish work and stays faithful to those eras’ golden decorations. The production of just one cup takes exactly 21 days. And the only place that produces these cups is in fact Galeri Set Osmanlı, which was founded in 1972 by Mehdi Sezen. The store is now owned by Mehdi Sezen’s sons, Bülent and Mukbil Sezen, and Uğur Bey. Uğur Bey runs the store.
Each color represents a different era
Coffee cups at Galeri Set Osmanlı were designed after conducting much research into the past, with different colors and shapes of cups representing different eras. The founding period of the Ottoman Empire has come to be identified with pink and turquoise-colored cups. As Uğur Bey sees it, these colors symbolize new beginnings and purity. After all, newly born babies are often dressed in these colors. Also, research shows that the color dark blue was very popular in the Kanuni (Süleyman the Magnificent) era, and in fact, this sultan’s tomb boasts ample dark blue in it. So, as you might expect, the cups from this era are dark blue.
The period of rising power in the Ottoman Empire has been identified with the color green. And the emblem of the Ottomans from this period was also green, which was also the color of the caliphate. As for the color yellow, this symbolizes the final era of the Ottomans. Also, yellow is often thought of as the color of disease and separation.
In addition to all of the above, the shapes of the cups change, too. When Abdülhamit II came to power in 1876, he had the Fabrika-yı Hümayun created, where French experts began to show their skill. It was then that cups with wide mouths and narrow bases started to be produced. But in fact Turkish coffee should be drunk from cups with wide bases and narrower mouths because in such cups it takes the coffee longer to cool, and the bubbles also stay in place for longer. Of course these special cups are not the only items for sale at Galeri Set Osmanlı. You can also find Ottoman-era ewers, shallow cooking pans, specially designed rice bowls and much, much more here. Furthermore, you can order personally designed items, too.
When you think about coffee cups of this type, it’s hard not to think about fortune-telling. Uğur Bey tells us about this tradition, saying, “This sort of fortune-telling through coffee grinds was a way for the concubines at the palace to tell each other things that they weren’t otherwise able to say.”
Uğur Bey told us a bit about the palace coffee ceremonies. “When a person would visit the palace, you would first remove your overcoats in the dressing rooms and look in the mirror to make yourself presentable. When you passed through the doors, you would be greeted with rose lokum [Turkish delight] and rose candies. The reasoning behind this was to ‘eat sweetly and talk sweetly.’ Also, lokum works to calm nerves by boosting blood sugar levels. After all, going to meet the sultan would make people nervous. After you had sweetened your mouth up, you would sit in your appointed place. Three palace concubines would serve coffee alongside the coffee master of the palace. These three coffee concubines would wear crisscrossed embroidered velvet coffee aprons. They would lean over to serve the coffee, and they would never look into the eyes of those they were serving.”
Best to use cold water when making Turkish coffee
We asked coffee expert Uğur Bey for some tips on how to make the best Turkish coffee possible. He notes that, after placing your coffee and your sugar (never sugar cubes!) in the copper cezve (long-handled pot for making coffee), you need to be sure and use cold water for the best taste. He explains that after the first boiling of this mixture, you achieve the famous bubbles that mark Turkish coffee, and after the second boiling, the coffee grounds are settled, and after the third, the coffee can be poured. Interestingly, Uğur Bey also tells us that there are two kinds of Turkish coffee: “normal” and “comfortable.” The normal is served with a glass of refreshing water next to it, but the comfortable one comes with some rose-flavored lokum. This is truly keeping in tradition, because going back in history in Turkey, coffee was never really served with chocolate, as it is in the West.
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