Coffee and Coffeehouses in
Ottoman and Safavid Lands, 1500–1800
Farshid Emami
Synopsis:
A plant native to the highlands of Ethiopia, coffee was first consumed as a hot beverage in the Yemen during the fourteenth or fifteenth century. During the sixteenth century, the new drink spread beyond the Arabian Peninsula and coffeehouses proliferated in the eastern Mediterranean region, which was under Ottoman rule. In the seventeenth century coffee was then introduced to Safavid Iran. This presentation explores the architecture of coffeehouses in Ottoman and Safavid lands, with a focus on the cities of Aleppo (Syria), Istanbul (Turkey), and Isfahan (Iran). As novel social establishments, coffeehouses shaped and hosted new form of urban sociability and contributed to the expansion of the public sphere.
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References:
Alafandi, Rami. “The Waqf of Ibshir Mustafa Pasha.” L.I.S.A. – The Science Portal of The Gerda Henkel Foundation.
David, Jean-Claude. Le waqf d’Ipšīr Pāšā à Alep (1063/1653): Étude d’urbanisme historique. Avec la collaboration de Bruno Chauffert-Yvart. Damascus: Presses de l’Ifpo, 1982.
Emami, Farshid. “Coffeehouses, Urban Spaces, and the Formation of a Public Sphere in Safavid Isfahan.” Muqarnas 33 (2016): 177–220.
Hattox, Ralph S. Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988.
Özkoçak, Selma Akyazıcı. “Coffee-houses: Rethinking the Public and Private in Early Modern Istanbul.” Journal of Urban History 33, no. 6 (2007): 965–86.
Watenpaugh, Heghnar Zeitlian. The Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
Citation:
Farshid Emami, “Coffee and Coffeehouses in Ottoman and Safavid Lands, 1500-1800,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 9 February 2021.

Farshid Emami Farshid Emami (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2017) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Rice University. He specializes in the history of Islamic architecture, urbanism, and the arts, with a focus on the early modern period and Safavid Iran. He is the author of Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State University Press, 2024). His scholarly interests include transregional histories of early modernity, social experiences of architecture and urban spaces, and the intersections of architecture and literature. In addition to his publications on Safavid art and architecture, he has written on topics such as lithography in nineteenth-century Iran and modernist architecture and urbanism in the Middle East.