Ottoman coffeehouse

The Ottoman coffeehouse, or Ottoman Café was a distinctive part of the culture of the Ottoman Empire. Europeans adopted this and other Ottoman leisure customs during the early modern period.

Protestantism and temperance

Cyrus Hamlin, co-founder of Robert College in Istanbul

In the 19th century Protestant missionaries set up several schools in the Ottoman Empire, including one in Istanbul that would later become Robert College. Cyrus Hamlin, who was President of the College until 1877 wrote: "Steam made Constantinople a commercial city and brought civilization, the arts and the vices of the West and East together in the Ottoman capital". He felt values were Christian rather than "Western" and both he and his successor George Washburn supported temperance in the Ottoman Empire. According to Mary Neuberger, "This inculcation of the Protestant work ethic was part of a more general assault on Balkan drunkeness and idleness." She writes that "many British and Americans writings celebrated the coffeehouse and even smoking as acceptable and regenerative forms of leisure, a sober foil to the drunken Balkan krŭchma" and that "the kafene was a presumed improvement for drunken and 'subjugated' Christian men."[1]

Music

Risto Pekka Pennanen argues that the Greek language café music is not an independent style as much as a "branch" of what she calls "Ottoman popular music" or the music that was performed at cafés and other leisure venues. She has written that some Greek writers "tend to underestimate the Ottoman element in smyrneika", explaining that "The nationalist point of view in Greek writing on music which stresses the domestic origins of cultural, political and social factors can be called Hellenocentrism".[2]

Comparison with European coffeehouses

Coffee and tobacco were common to both European and Ottoman coffeehouses, but they also had some differences. Unlike the English and French coffeehouses, Ottoman coffeehouses did not serve alcohol or meals, and were not patronized by women. Some authors have written that "when a young man gazed through the window of a coffeehouse, he was aspriring to adulthood, and his admission to the institution was a communally recognized transition to adult life". Western European coffeehouses were also "masculine spaces", but women would sometimes go to coffeehouses despite social conventions, because no formal rules prohibited their attendance. Though women's participation in coffeehouse culture was not socially acceptable at first, it gradually became more acceptable in Western Europe throughout the 19th century. The traditional culture endured at Ottoman coffeehouses until the introduction of "cafés' in the 20th century.[3]

References

  1. ↑ Mary C. Neuburger (2013). "Coffeehouse Babble: Smoking and Sociability in the Long Nineteenth Century". Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria. Cornell University Press. JSTOR 10.7591/j.cttq43m0.5.
  2. ↑ Pennanen, Risto Pekka (2004). "The Nationalization of Ottoman Popular Music in Greece". Ethnomusicology. 48 (1): 1–25. JSTOR 30046238.
  3. ↑ Borsay, Peter; Furnée, Jan Hein (2016). Leisure Cultures in Urban Europe, C. 1700-1870: A Transnational Perspective. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-7190-8969-5.
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