Coffee's origin story starts, as legend has it, with a bored goat herder in Ethiopia. Kaldi, tending his herd in the highlands of the Kaffa region, noticed his usually placid goats leaping around with improbable energy after munching on bright red berries from an unfamiliar shrub. He tried a few himself and got humanity's first caffeine buzz.
When he brought his find to a nearby Sufi monastery, the dervishes were suspicious and chucked the berries into the fire. That turned out to be a lucky mistake: as the seeds roasted, the aroma convinced the monks these were no demonic offerings. They fished the beans out of the embers, crushed them into hot water, and brewed what the story calls the first cup of coffee — perfect fuel for their all-night prayers.
The legend was written down centuries later, but the documented history is almost as good. Chewing the red berries for energy was already an Ethiopian habit when the plant crossed the Red Sea to Yemen in the 15th century. There, Sufi lodges began roasting and boiling beans to stay awake during nighttime devotion, laying the groundwork for coffee culture as we know it. Ships leaving the port of Mocha spread the beans far and wide.
Coffee's route into Europe ran through Istanbul. In the 16th century, Özdemir Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Yemen, liked the drink so much he introduced it to the Ottoman palace, and the cezve-brewed style we now call Turkish coffee was born. By the 1550s, the first coffeehouses had opened in the city's Tahtakale neighbourhood, and coffee drinking became an art form that inspired poets and thinkers. Venetian merchants then carried it west, eventually to the streets of Venice and Paris — and from there, the multibillion-dollar global habit took off.
For travellers, this is a story you can taste on the ground. Ethiopia's Kaffa region remains a pilgrimage spot for coffee lovers, Yemen's old port of Mocha gave its name to the drink, and Istanbul still treats coffee as heritage — UNESCO agrees, having inscribed Turkish coffee culture on its intangible cultural heritage list. Sipping a thick, frothy cup in a historic Istanbul coffeehouse is a way of retracing the drink's journey from goat herd to global obsession.
