Turkish Coffee as a Political Drink

Abstract

Recently, one comes across interesting publications on the close relationship between some foodstuff and politics. While some foodstuff and drinks have their own histories, some of them, as they spread in different geographies, have influenced culture, economy, religious life and politics and also have been influenced by them. Turkish coffee provides a striking and colorful example for the relationship between a drink and politics as well as religious culture in Europe since its arrival at the southeastern-most part of the continent, namely Istanbul. I suggest that Turkish coffee was a political drink or was politicized in its earliest time (mid-sixteenth century) in Istanbul, because political meanings were often attached to the drink and the places where it was consumed. The first part of the present work shows how a newly introduced drink (Turkish coffee) involved the state (and politics) as well as religion both in the Ottoman capital and several parts of Christian Europe. Thus, this part is more about a drink influencing the politics and culture in the lands where it spread. Yet, the second part of the work reflects just the reverse, that is, how politics shapes to its purposes the everyday language, including gastronomy, as it dwells on two late twentieth-century cases in which Turkish coffee became Greek and Bosnian coffees respectively due to politics and nationalism. In the Greek and Bosnian cases, one witnesses how a simple drink, namely Turkish coffee, becomes an object of national identity and national pride by merely assuming a national name. Therefore, once again coffee became a political drink and part of the identity of many people in the 20th century. History of coffee and coffeehouses which includes their relationship with society and politics provides an interesting and important example for the rising field of material history.