Turkish and Greek Coffee, One Small Cup with Two Names

A small long-handled pot, a spoon of coffee ground as fine as flour, a low flame. In Istanbul the pot is a cezve. In Athens it is a briki. Watch both cooks and you will see the same hands doing the same thing. The difference between Turkish and Greek coffee is mostly a name, and the name has a story.

The method they share

Both start with coffee ground to a powder, mostly Arabica. It goes into the pot with cold water and, if you want it, sugar, which has to be decided before the pot goes on the heat, because nothing is stirred in afterwards. The coffee warms slowly. Just as it begins to rise, the pot comes off the flame. It is never left to boil hard, because boiling kills the foam.

That foam is the mark of a cup made well. In Turkish it is called kopuk. In Greek it is kaimaki. Either way it is spooned into the cup first, and the coffee poured in after it. A glass of water sits beside the cup, and the grounds settle to the bottom while you drink. You stop before you reach them.

The cups are small, usually 60 to 90 millilitres. In Greece you order by sugar: sketos with none, metrios medium, glykys sweet. In Turkey the words are sade, orta and sekerli. Same choice, different tongue.

How coffee reached the pot

Coffee came to this corner of the world from Yemen. In the 1400s, Sufis there drank it to stay awake through night prayers. By the 1550s it had reached Istanbul, and the first coffeehouse in the city is usually dated to 1554 or 1555, opened by two men from Syria, often named in the records as Hakam and Shams.

The coffeehouse became the room where the city talked. Imams worried about it. Sultans tried more than once to close them. The cups kept coming. A Turkish proverb says that a single cup of coffee is remembered for forty years, which tells you what the drink was really for.

In 2013, UNESCO placed Turkish coffee culture and tradition on its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Not the drink alone. The habit around it.

How it got a new name

For a long time, Greeks called it Turkish coffee, because that is what it was called everywhere the Ottoman Empire had reached. In the 1970s that changed. A campaign to rename it gathered force after the 1974 conflict in Cyprus, and coffee companies and cafes took up the new name. Within a generation, “Greek coffee” was simply what the cup was called in Greece, and asking for Turkish coffee in an Athens cafe could earn you a look.

Nothing in the pot changed. Only the word on the menu did.

A cup in hard years

During the occupation of Greece in the Second World War, real coffee all but vanished. People are remembered roasting chickpeas and barley to brew something dark enough to hold in the morning. It did not taste like coffee. It was something to sit down with.

That is the thread through both countries. The cup is small on purpose. It is too hot to rush and too thick to gulp, so it holds two people at a table for as long as it takes to drink. In Turkey, coffee still marks the big days: a young woman preparing coffee for her suitor’s family at a marriage visit is a custom many people still recognise. In Greece, it is the slow cup in the kafeneio, the coffee shop where older men sit with a newspaper and a tavli board.

Two names, one cup

Two countries have argued over a great deal. The coffee, at least, keeps its own counsel. Pour a cup in Izmir and a cup in Thessaloniki and set them side by side, and most people at the table could not tell you which was which.

The grounds go to the bottom. The conversation rises.