https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/08/26/travel/turkey-coffee-istanbul-ottoman-empire

Calling Turkish coffee “just a drink” undersells it. It’s a ritual, a conversation and, as arguably the ancestor of all modern coffees, it’s a nearly 500-year-old piece of history, inscribed by UNESCO on its intangible cultural heritage of humanity list.

Coffee’s roots go back even further. Lani Kingston, adjunct professor at Portland State University, says a single coffee bean dating from the 12th century has been found at an archaeological site in the United Arab Emirates. By 1350, coffee-serving paraphernalia appeared in Turkey, Egypt and Persia.

The story of Turkish coffee begins not in Turkey, but in Yemen. In the 15th century, Sufi mystics are said to have consumed it to stay awake during long nights of prayer and devotions. When Sultan Süleyman, known in Europe as Süleyman the Magnificent, seized Yemen in 1538, coffee made its way into the Ottoman Empire. Within a year, the beans had reached Constantinople — the ancient city that is now Istanbul.

In 1539, the Ottoman admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa registered a property that included a “kahve odası,” or coffee room, according to Cemal Kafadar, Harvard professor and author of an academic paper about coffee: “How Dark is the History of the Night, How Black the Story of Coffee, How Bitter the Tale of Love: The Changing Measure of Leisure and Pleasure in Early Modern Istanbul.”

By the 1550s, the first “kahvehanes,” or coffeehouses were appearing in İstanbul, chronicled by historian İbrahim Peçevi in his book, “History of Peçevi.” The beverage’s new popularity quickly reshaped cultural life. The Ottoman cezve-ibrik method of preparing coffee — shared with Greece and rooted in Ethiopia — became the hallmark of traditional Turkish coffee. As gastronomy researcher Merin Sever explains, the fundamental difference between Turkish and other coffees is that cezve-ibrik is essentially cooking; it’s not brewed, but “cooked” in water like a soup, producing an unfiltered drink.