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Turkish coffee
houses : (Çay ocağı)
Even the smallest Turkish village has
its coffee-house or kahvehane, where men can talk, drink tea, coffee, and play the national game
of backgammon "Tavla". In
many parts of Turkey especially, men can still be seen smoking
their water pipes "Nargile" in these
kind of coffee houses.
Turkish coffee
houses were not just places where people puffed on
water pipes and lazed around. They were hubs of
social life where people gathered to listen to music,
poetry and songs, to converse, and to discuss
religious, economic and political topics. Indeed it
was due to the latter that various excuses were
found to close down the coffee houses on several
occasions over the centuries.
Coffee houses
were of several types. First of all there were the
local coffee houses in each neighbourhood, simple
establishments where the members of the community
gathered, and those in commercial districts used by
the tradesmen of the area.
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Old
Turkish coffe houses
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Turkish
tea ceremony :
When you wake up in the
morning in Turkey, your first thought is to enjoy a tiny glass of ruby
tinted tea. The day goes on, and after lunch it is time to chat over
more tea. Then around 5 o'clock in the afternoon comes tea accompanied
by crisp simit rings sprinkled with sesame seeds with white cheese. Tea
is an important part of Turkish daily life, as it is in Britain, China
and Japan.
The most widely consumed drink in the world, tea is made from the tender
leaves at the tips of the branches of the evergreen plant Thea sinensis
or Camellia sinensis. There are three principal varieties of tea plant,
Chinese, Assam and Cambodian, and many hybrids produced from
these.
Different processing results in three categories of tea: fermented tea (black), unfermented
(green) and semi-fermented (oolong). Black tea is
amber in colour and has an astringent flavour, green tea is slightly
bitter in taste, and oolong has a delicate flavour and a pale greenish
brown colour.
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| The world's foremost tea producers are
India, China, Georgia, Iran and Turkey. The first significant attempt to
cultivate tea in Turkey was made around Batum (now in
Georgia) at the
southeastern extremity of the Black Sea in 1918. Until the
1940s locally grown tea was processed by hand in small workshops. Then
in 1941 and 1942 came tea rolling machines, and in 1947 the Rize Tea
Factory was established, the first in Turkey. The autonomous state tea
corporation, Çay-Kur, was founded in 1971 to coordinate both the
cultivation and processing of tea, and in 1973 it went into active
operation. Çay-Kur aimed to expand tea cultivation, keep up with
innovations in tea processing technology, and import and export tea as
necessary. Until 1984, when tea processing and packaging were opened up
to private enterprise, Çay-Kur enjoyed a monopoly over Turkish tea
production.
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While British, Indian and Pakistani tea lovers mix their
beverage with milk, in Turkey tea is generally flavoured only with sugar
and occasionally lemon. Winter and summer, steaming hot fragrant tea is
served in little narrow waisted glasses, preferably crystal. The small
metal spoons produce an agreeable tinkling sound as the sugar is stirred;
a sweet impromptu melody. Although tea drinking in Turkey has no
particular ceremony attached to it, and is drunk hurriedly standing up
before the rush to work on weekdays, on Sundays it enjoys a festive
place at the breakfast table. The inhabitants of southeast Turkey claim
that hot tea has a cooling effect in the blazing summer heat. The
eastern city of Erzurum is renowned for the habit of drinking tea kıtlama
fashion, which involves placing a sugar lump in the mouth and sipping
the tea through it, rather than sweetening the tea in the glass.
Pondering our tea drinking habit, Turkey has a tea
culture in no way inferior to that of countries where it is a habit of far
greater antiquity.
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