Turks, Austrians, and Coffee: The History of the “Mysterious Brown Beans”

This paper takes as its starting point the fluctuating biography of a nationally ambiguous 17th century trader, Georg Franz Kolschitzky, and the “mysterious brown beans” (coffee) he is said to have introduced into Vienna. According to legend the Turkish-speaking Pole (later claimed as Ukrainian) stumbled across piles of the hard pellets left behind by retreating Turks after the siege of Vienna in 1683. He thereafter opened the first Viennese coffeehouse. This paper reads the Kolschitzky legend critically, tracing the political and commercial history of “Turkish coffee” in Vienna, examining import patterns, marketing and advertising strategies and the medical discourse  about coffee consumption in the 19th and early 20th centuries. On one hand, the story of coffee in Vienna is one in which an “oriental” beverage was domesticated, made European; among coffeehouse owners and their patrons, coffee consumption became a part of Viennese “culture.” On the other hand, reports from Austrian travelers to the Ottoman lands almost invariably described the seedy, unkempt coffeehouse in the Turkish provinces as a symbol of all that was backward about the Orient. The paper draws on the trade journal of the Viennese Coffeehouse Owners’ Association, travel accounts from Austrians in Turkey and commemoration literature remembering the siege of Vienna. In these sources, coffee beans, as exchanged goods, sit between folk legend and history.