The Coffee Shop

"Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" T. S. Eliot, from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

In modern days, a Sunday morning stroll without having coffee in one of the many coffee shops in a city center sounds unthinkable. However, five hundred years ago, the idea of having coffee in a shop surrounded by other seated clients was still a novelty.

Coffee was already known in Ethiopia where peasants used to eat the plant’s beans along with bread. From Ethiopia, the coffee beans were introduced to the Middle East in 12th c. while during the 14th c. the consumption of coffee has been spread in the Arabic Peninsula. The first coffee shop is located in Mecca (Arabia) with Egypt and Syria following along. Via Egypt, coffee reached Constantinople directly after its occupation by the Ottomans in 1553.

A few decades later, the first coffee shop opened in the city by two Syrians close to Hagia Sophia. Τhat shop had a rather multicultural patronage: traders from Greece, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and all over the vast Ottoman Empire. Coffeehouses began to spread at such a rate that the Sultan decided to ban them under the pressure of the muftis (islamic jurists) who complained that the people were neglecting their religious duties and instead schemed against the authorities. The mob’s reaction was so fierce that the Sultan obliged to withdraw the ban.

In Europe, the first coffeehouse was founded by a Greek immigrant from Asia Minor in London, in 1652, under the name "Greek Coffee House" and became a bustling meeting point for intellectuals. The thrill of having a cup of coffee in a coffeehouse quickly spread throughout France, with "Café Procope" being a hub for the Enlightenment era intellectuals, such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot.

Through the Ottomans, the coffeehouse arrived to Greece. Τhe Turkish traveler Evliya Celebi talks about 348 coffeehouses in Thessaloniki in 1668, where "musicians, mimes, singers, jesters, poets and intellectuals used to gather and talk". The first coffee shop after the War of Independence opened its gates in Nafplio, while in Athens the oldest coffeehouses were the "Green Tree" (1834) and the "Beautiful Hellas" (1839) which has been visited by the storyteller Hans Christian Andersen who came to Athens in the 1840s.

The regime often considered coffeehouses hotbeds of revolutionary ideas and treated them with suspicion or aggression. Political battles, election campaigns, intellectual debates, theatrical performances, and even film screenings took place inside the coffeehouses of the 20th century. According to researcher Giorgos Pittas "the coffee shop is a place to exchange information and values. A link between the community and the society."

In this Thematic Exhibition, coffeehouses and patrons in paintings, photographs and drawings illustrate the history of coffeeshops. Even though coffee culture has evolved a lot during 21st c., the primal concept remains the same: the longing of people to get together and talk over a cup of coffee.