Turkish coffee

Turkish coffee

A cup of Turkish coffee, served from a copper cezve, in Turkey.
Type	Coffee
Country of origin	Turkey
Region of origin	İstanbul
Colour	Dark brown

Turkish coffee (Turkish: Türk kahvesi) is a method of preparing unfiltered coffee. Roasted and then finely ground coffee beans are simmered (not boiled) in a pot (cezve), optionally with sugar, and served in a cup where the grounds are allowed to settle. At present, it is found in Indonesia, Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Caucasus, the Balkans, and Middle East.

Turkish coffee is an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Turkey confirmed by UNESCO.

The earliest evidence of coffee drinking comes from 15th-century Yemen. By the late 15th century and early 16th century, coffee had spread to Cairo and Mecca. In the 1640s, the Ottoman Bosnian chronicler İbrahim Peçevi reported the opening of the first coffeehouse in Constantinople.

The word 'coffee' comes from the Arabic word قهوة qahwah. The importance of coffee in Turkish culture is evident in the words 'breakfast', , whose literal meaning is "before coffee" ( 'coffee' + altı 'under/before') and 'brown', , whose literal meaning is, "the color of coffee".

The word for "coffeeshop" in Modern Standard Arabic is مقهى (maqha, literally meaning "place of coffee", plural, مقاهي maqahi(n)), but the more common term in colloquial Arabic is simply قهوة (qahwa), meaning "coffee" in much the same way as many Romance languages use café for both.