A cup of coffee is remembered for forty years, says the Turkish proverb. Yet Istanbul once banned its coffeehouses. Twice.
Coffee came to Istanbul by ship; the scholar Kâtib Çelebi dates it to 1543.
The shops came in the 1550s. Sources argue over the year, 1553 or 1555. The chronicler Peçevi names the men: Hakem of Aleppo and Şems of Damascus, each opening a large coffeehouse in Tahtakale, Eminönü.
So Istanbul's first coffeehouses were run by two men from Syria. Not locals.
Not everyone approved. The jurist Ebussuud Efendi called it a drink of sinners. In 1568 Istanbul's coffeehouses were banned and treated like taverns; in 1633 Murad IV closed them across the empire after a fire was blamed on tobacco.
Coffee won. It became part of engagements and holidays, and in 2013 UNESCO listed "Turkish coffee culture and tradition" as intangible heritage: fine-ground coffee served in a small cup with a glass of water, mostly in coffeehouses where people talk.
The brewing is the ritual. Cold water, fine coffee and sugar, if you want it, go into a cezve, a copper pot wider at the base: heat to just at the boil, lift as the foam rises, return once or twice.
Then the part UNESCO itself mentions: the grounds left in the empty cup are often used to tell your fortune.
And the forty years? Bir fincan kahvenin kırk yıl hatırı vardır. It isn't on UNESCO's page. It doesn't need to be.
Skip the tourist cafés; ask a local where they'd have theirs. Sugar goes in at the brewing, so say how sweet you want it when you order. Drink slowly, leave the grounds, and for the fortune turn the cup onto the saucer to cool. For the history, walk Tahtakale, where Hakem and Şems opened the first shops.
