the council eventually relented and gave him a property at 30 Haidgasse worth over 1000 gulden. It has not been possible to establish whether this in fact became Vienna’s first coffee house; nonetheless, Kolschitsky’s keen sense of his own worth has etched itself on the history of Viennese coffee, so that he has become the hero he almost certainly never was. His statue can be found adorning the exterior of the Café Zwirina.
However flawed his character may have been, it is the case that the Viennese did take enthusiastically to coffee after the siege. They may have been helped in adjusting to the new taste by the invention of the croissant, or, as it was then known, the pfizer. Supposedly created by a Viennese baker who had discovered a Turkish mining operation whilst working at night in his bakery, the curved bread roll was based on the crescent moon that featured prominently on the Ottoman flag, as it still does on that of many Islamic countries. In these highly charged days, it is salutary to recall that, every morning, many in the Christian world celebrate the crushing of Islam in a kind of unconscious anti-Communion.
The Siege of Vienna saw the end of expansion of the Ottoman Empire as a European coalition fought to regain lost territory. The Sultans became increasingly mired in debt, and the slave girls poised with their fine porcelain coffee cups at the lips of the Sultan gave way to the vulgar diamond-encrusted self-service coffee cups of the late imperial era, which can still be seen in the treasury of the Top Kapi Palace in Istanbul. Under Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), Turkey finally turned its back on its Ottoman history, became a secular society, and, mysteriously, took up tea drinking, as if four hundred years of glorious coffee culture had never been.
The curious role of coffee in the lifecycle of these early empires was thus complete: the Sufis and the Ottomans had developed coffee drinking as a result of observing tea drinking during one of the rare forays of officials of the Chinese Empire into the Arabian Sea. The coffee habit, initially ritualistic, had fuelled Ottoman expansion during the heyday of their Empire, only to be handed on like a relay baton to the Habsburg Empire and to other European nations, where coffee, stripped of its spiritual function, in turn catalysed the creation of aggressive mercantile cultures linked with European imperialism. As the Ottomans slowly collapsed, so they reverted to drinking what was perhaps the inspiration for their love affair with coffee. Turkey is now the third largest consumer – and fifth largest producer – of tea worldwide.
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