Kaveh kanes and liberty - coffee fact and quote of the day

"Coffee-house by the Ortaköy Mosque in Constantinople"  Oil painting by Ivan Constantinovich Aivazovsky  (1846)

(n) factoid
(something resembling a fact; unverified (often invented) information that is given credibility because it appeared in print) WordNet

Fact or factoid? It’s not always easy to tell, but here’s today’s installment of what “they” say:

Hey, Big Brother—better keep an eye on those Starbucks…

Some sources claim the first public coffee house was Kiva Han, established in Constantinople (current Istanbul), Turkey in 1475. However, in 1922, All About Coffee by William Harrison Ukers was published by The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company, a book that encompassed 17 years of travel, research, sorting and classification of material, including four years of writing. Ukers states that Mecca was the site of the first coffee houses in the 1400s, called kaveh kanes, where “the idle congregated to drink coffee, to play chess and other games, to discuss the news of the day, and to amuse themselves with singing, dancing, and music, contrary to the manners of the rigid Mahommedans, who were very properly scandalized by such performances.” It was not just the “scandalizing” that brought about the end of those first coffee houses. According to the International Coffee Organization website article, The Story of Coffee, “The Arabian coffeehouses soon became centres of political activity and were suppressed.”
 

Turkish Coffee                                  Bertil Videt

That leads me to:

The Quote of the Day:

One of the most interesting facts in the history of the coffee drink is that wherever it has been introduced it has spelled revolution. It has been the world's most radical drink in that its function has always been to make people think. And when the people began to think, they became dangerous to tyrants and to foes of liberty of thought and action.
 

William Harrison Ukers, from All About Coffee

 

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Mary Ann Lien
Midland Food Examiner – Dallas edition