Ottoman Coffeehouses, Games and Entertainment

From the sixteenth century onward, Ottoman coffeehouses gave customers a place to drink and spend time together. Coffee became a widely consumed drink in Yemen in the late fifteenth century, then spread through Mecca in present-day Saudi Arabia and Cairo in Egypt to Istanbul in present-day Turkey by the middle of the sixteenth. Later accounts describe coffee, poems, games, storytelling and shadow theatre in these rooms.

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Preparing and serving coffee

Before brewing, coffee beans were roasted and ground to a fine powder, then mixed with hot water. Istanbul’s coffee trade included roasting workshops called tahmis, where beans were crushed before retail sale. At the coffeehouse, a cup of coffee gave customers a reason to stay, talk or watch games. A late-sixteenth-century Ottoman miniature studied by Eminegül Karababa and Güliz Ger depicts about 45 men, with regulars seated near the furnace, coffee cups and a game that the authors identify as chess or mankala, a family of count-and-capture games played with counters in pits. Their study describes the depicted social exchange: a Sufi dervish, a religious practitioner, discusses poetry with turbaned poetry enthusiasts, while men from varied occupations share the room. Karababa and Ger also read the miniature’s lower-center scene as a backgammon match, with one player apparently throwing the dice.

Coffee was also served in homes and at court. A silver-gilt coffee pot in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection, dated 1809–60, is identified as the kind displayed in reception rooms of upper-class Syrian homes. At the Ottoman palace, a chief coffee officer and assistants prepared the sultan’s drink. A Pera Museum account says coffee was served in the harems, the private quarters of the palace and mansions, by female attendants: one carried the tray and cups, another the brazier, a container of hot coals that kept the jug warm, and a third poured coffee into porcelain cups set in holders of gold, tombac (a copper-zinc alloy), silver or porcelain.

Early Istanbul coffeehouses and their customers

Accounts give slightly different dates for Istanbul’s first shops. The Ottoman writer Âlî Mustafa Efendi places their opening in 1553; the later chronicler Peçevi describes Hakem of Aleppo and Şems of Damascus establishing coffeehouses in Tahtakale in 1554–55. Their shops made coffee a commercial service: workers prepared the drink while customers paid to sit, talk and spend time away from home and work.

Peçevi describes some gatherings of roughly 20 or 30 people. Customers read books and poems, discussed new verse or watched tavla and chess. In modern backgammon, dice determine how many spaces players move their counters; each tries to move all counters around the board and bear them off, or remove them from play, to win. Modern chess alternates moves as players try to checkmate the opposing king by attacking it with no legal escape. Karababa and Ger also describe how men of letters preferred coffeehouses as easier, cheaper meeting places than homes. A sixteenth-century decree they cite lists judges, preachers, professors, students, dervishes, merchants, soldiers, artisans and poor or idle men among the patrons.

In early modern Ottoman urban life, coffeehouses were especially associated with men’s leisure. Karababa and Ger contrast this with the public bathhouse, a popular leisure setting for women. The two venues offered different routines: a coffeehouse provided seating, coffee and conversation, while the bathhouse organized washing, grooming and social visits.

Reading could be shared aloud. Elif Sezer-Aydınlı and İrvin Cemil Schick’s study of Istanbul public reading from the seventeenth century onward includes coffeehouses among the places where readers voiced stories, tales and epics. One reader could carry a story through the room while listeners followed the performance, turning a written text into a shared event.

Meddah storytellers and Karagöz shadow theatre

In the Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s description of the traditional meddah form, a meddah is a solo storyteller who acts several roles through voice and mimicry. The performer sits before listeners with a handkerchief and a short stick, using them as props while shifting between characters. The account names coffeehouses, city gatherings, palace settings and evenings during Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month, as well as circumcision celebrations as venues. One performer can turn a folktale, legend or account of daily life into a many-character show.

Karagöz shadow theatre used flat figures called tasvir, cut from translucent animal hide and attached to rods between a lamp and a white screen. A puppeteer moved the figures and supplied their dialogue and voices. Karagöz was a blunt commoner; Hacivat was his educated, polished counterpart, and their misunderstandings opened onto other characters and comic exchanges. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s description of the living tradition gives a four-part sequence: Hacivat’s song and call, the pair’s dialogue, a main story, then a closing exchange. Coffeehouses were among the historical settings for Karagöz performances, alongside gardens, homes and public spaces, especially during Ramadan and at circumcision feasts.

Regulation and changing uses

Officials issued coffeehouse closure orders in several places. In 1559, authorities ordered closures in Homs, in present-day Syria; in 1565, in Aleppo and Damascus in Syria and Jerusalem; and in 1568, in Istanbul and Galata, now within Istanbul. In Istanbul, şeyhülislâm Ebüssuûd Efendi, the chief religious jurist, objected to coffeehouse gatherings where patrons played tavla or chess, drank and missed prayers. In 1592, Bostanzâde Mehmed Efendi issued a favorable ruling that coffee was a permissible drink.

Sultan Murad IV’s 1633 prohibition closed Istanbul coffeehouses and banned coffee drinking. Later authorities brought the shops under supervision and limited closures to particular establishments where officials identified improper conduct. Coffee became a taxed commodity and a regular source of state revenue.

In the nineteenth century, some Istanbul coffeehouses added newspapers and periodicals to conversation and performance. Sarafim’s kıraathane, or reading room, opened on Divanyolu in 1857. Customers read newspapers and journals there, and Ramadan evenings brought literary discussion. The reading room carried coffeehouse sociability into a print-centered setting.