A Drink of the Devil:
The History of Coffee in Poland
Poland’s relationship with coffee is a wildly surprising one. Not only are European café culture’s roots mixed up in it, but at some point the black stuff was replaced with acorns. Sounds devilish? That’s what many Poles thought. Time to put a pot on and drink in Culture.pl’s heady brew of coffee history.
One on the first coffee amateurs in Poland was King Jan III Sobieski. Legend has it that hundreds of big sacks full of coffee beans were saved by Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki during the Siege of Vienna in 1683. Initially, coffee beans were purchased from the heretics in Turkey and imported to Poland.
The drink was considered very suspicious. Some even claimed that coffee was a devilish beverage – its dark colour was supposedly confirmation. Besides, the question was raised whether coffee, like chocolate, could be consumed during the old Polish Lent.
Jan Andrzej Morsztyn put it bluntly – coffee ‘is a devilish drink which twists the Christian face’.
In Malta, I recall, we tasted kahva, [….] a Turkish drink, a hideous beverage like deadly poison or venom, which lets no saliva through your teeth; a Christian mouth it shall not contaminate.
But attitudes towards coffee began to change when it started to be imported to Poland from the Netherlands…
Read the rest of the article https://culture.pl/en/article/history-of-coffee-in-poland
