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Conveying Ćeif 

FOLKLORICA 2019, Vol. XXIII 

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Conveying Ćeif: -ree Croatian Folklore and Folklife Writings on Bosniak 
Coffee Culture 

Dorian Jurić 
McMaster University 

Fruitvale, Canada 

Abstract 

Fis article presents three short passages describing coffee and coffeehouse 
culture among Bosnian and Herzegovinian Muslims in the late nineteenth century. 
Fese texts are drawn from manuscripts collected by lay, Croatian folklore and 
folklife collectors who submitted them to two early collecting projects in Zagreb. 
Fe pieces are translated here for the first time into English and placed into 
historical and cultural context regarding the history of coffee culture in Bosnia 
and Herzegovina and the wider Ottoman Empire as well as the politics of folklore 
collection at the time. By using the Pan-Ottoman concept of ćeif as a theoretical 
lens, I argue that these early folklorists produced impressive folklife accounts of 
Bosniak foodways, but that these depictions inevitably enfolded both genuine 
interest and negative by-products of the wider politics of their era. 

Introduction 

Of all the comestibles to transition from localized context to global 
phenomenon, none can claim the same position of influence as coffee. Charting 
an astronomic trajectory over the course of 500 years, coffee moved from a wild 
plant cultivated in modern-day Ethiopia to a global trade item that revolutionized 
religious observance, social interactions, political process, human rights, city 
planning, and the nature of labor practices. Fe history of that life-course is a 
dynamic tapestry of movement through various cultures and chronologies, full of 
social upheaval, poetic inspiration, and the vigorous remodeling of public and 
private custom. 

Fis article is concerned with one of the earlier campaigns in coffee’s global 
conquest. While the plant’s initial migration brought it a short distance from 
Ethiopia to the Arab world, in less than a century it had become a major trade item 
of the Ottoman Empire. Before Western Europeans would take diplomatic sips of 
the bitter drink and decide it had a place back home, coffee had already spread to 
the farthest reaches of the Ottomans’ holdings in Eastern Europe, an area whose 
coffee culture is seldom included in popular histories of the beverage. 

Here, I present three passages, translated from published and unpublished 
manuscripts submitted to two early folklore and folklife projects in nineteenth-
century Croatia that concern aspects of Bosnian Muslim coffee culture. (1) All 
three were collected by Croatian school teachers working in a newly occupied 
Bosnia and Herzegovina, who were attempting to explain the culture of the region 
to a Croatian audience. By returning to these documents and the historical 



 

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circumstances that contextualize them, I hope to contribute some useful data to 
the study of coffee and its history for a region that is often overlooked. 
Additionally, on a discursive level these passages also provide material for 
research on the academic historiography of folklore and anthropology research in 
an area of the world riven by political division and post-colonial legacies. Fose 
legacies produced what Bakić-Hayden coined ‘Nesting Orientalisms’—a small 
scale gradient of telescoping ‘Western gazes’ in a region that was itself considered 
marginal and too ‘Eastern’ to belong to Europe [1995; Cf. Todorova 1997]. In this 
context of the academic face of Freud’s narcissism of small differences, Croatian 
folklore accounts of Bosniak coffee culture can not only reveal what coffee meant 
to nineteenth-century Bosniaks but also what it meant for Croats interested in 
learning about, as they imagined them, their “brethren” lost to the Muslim faith. 
Such a critical lens contributes to recent studies of the nexus between foodways 
and ethnic/racial/national politics [Appadurai 1988; Chen 2011; Ellis 2009; Jones 
2017; Pilcher 1998; Preston-Werner 2009; Williment 2001] by providing a 
vantage into the discursive paradigms that Croatian scholars employed to discuss 
a population which they endeavored to depict as simultaneously co-nationals and 
exotic others. 

Fe Concept of Ćeif 

In this article, I argue that the three lay Croatian folklorists, Antun Hangi, 
Franjo Murgić, and Ivan Zovko, in depicting a broader matrix of cultural life that 
surrounded Bosniak coffee culture, were producing very early examples of 
folklife writings on foodways, “the network of behaviours, traditions, and beliefs 
concerning food” [Long 2004: 8; cf. Anderson 1971]. Modern scholars of coffee 
culture have often remarked on the terse nature of historical descriptions of 
coffeehouses and the preparing, serving, and drinking of coffee before the 
twentieth century [Mikhail 2007: 214-5 n.85]. Rituals surrounding coffee use are 
often elaborate and coffeehouses are a lively nexus of social life that merit 
comprehensive exposition and yet, many historical accounts offer nothing more 
than brief descriptions of appurtenances and cooking methods. (2) Fe three 
accounts provided here, though brief, attempt in various ways to convey the feel 
and function of a Bosniak coffeehouse and the role that coffee culture played in 
the lives of Bosnian Muslims. I discuss this division between simple and layered 
depictions of coffee culture through the conceptual lens offered by the term ćeif.  

As a combined practice, drinking coffee and smoking in the Western 
Balkans are intimately tied to the concept of ćeif. Fe Bosnian, Croatian, 
Montenegrin and Serbian (hereafter, BCMS) languages, and Bosnian to a much 
larger degree, are rife with Turkish loanwords. While many are straightforward 
loans that simply fill a lexical gap, there is a unique set of dynamic conceptual 
vocabulary for emotional states in the language that are originally derived from 
Arabic. Fese words generally have an initial breadth of simplistic meaning with 
a depth of expanded connotation that makes them conducive to adoption and to 
adaptation into local idiomatic and phrasal lexicons. Fe word ćeif is one such 



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word. (3) Derived from Arabic kayf, through Turkish keyif, it embodies a complex 
of basic meanings: condition, mood, will, pleasure, good humor, etc., as well as a 
higher, abstract meaning—what Sir Richard Francis Burton described as “the 
savouring of animal existence; the passive enjoyment of mere sense” [1874 I: 8-
9]. All of these meanings have been retained in Bosnian and have been elaborated 
and colored by a complex of local idioms exemplified in the phrase ‘biti u ćejfu,’ 
‘to be in ćeif.’ Fis word, and the matrix of meaning surrounding it is intimately 
tied to Bosniak culture in the region and regularly connected to the acts of drinking 
coffee and/or smoking tobacco. For most Bosniaks, ćeif describes a positive and 
peaceful state of being where one feels removed from the flow of time and the 
stresses of the world. 

Like coffee, ćeif is a pan-Ottoman phenomenon; both were borrowed from 
the Arabs by Ottoman Turks and thence diffused throughout their empire. 
Westerners travelling in various Eastern regions would regularly encounter the 
term and become enamored with the richness of its connotation. To drink coffee 
is to drink coffee no matter where it occurs, but to find ćeif in the drinking of 
coffee was perceived as a particularly ‘Eastern’ phenomenon. As a region of 
proximity where East/West divisions were regularly constituted, challenged, and 
produced, the Balkans, even into the present day, often acted as a microcosm of 
wider conceptions of difference in the Eurasian sphere. By traversing distances of 
sometimes no more than 100 kilometers to speak with people in their native 
tongues, even lay Croatian scholars could see themselves as engaging in the 
crossing of deep cultural borders to explore the “East.” In his book, Život i običaje 
Muslimana u Bosni i Hercegovini [Fe Life and Customs of the Muslims in 
Bosnia and Herzegovina] [1906], Antun Hangi [1906: 15] waxed poetic about ćeif 
with an unfamiliar Croatian audience in mind: 

Ćeif is something quite unique which, aside from our Muslims, likely no 
other nation in the world recognizes. Just as the French have their esprit, 
so do our Muslims have their ćeif. But what a difference between ćeif 
and esprit! While esprit describes something spritely and ebullient, ćeif 
denotes that a man has calmed himself, that not only is his body at ease, 
but also his soul. Ćeif is “when one ascends to some kind of carefree 
realm, not knowing for a moment that one is breathing, let alone that one 
is drinking a coffee or chomping on a tobacco cigarette.” Ferefore, it is 
something akin to the Italian “Dolce far niente” [pleasant idleness]. Ćeif 
is also, in a wider sense, that which we [Croatians] would say “my 
pleasure” [hoće mi se, lit. I am inclined] or “gladly” [drago mi je lit. it is 
dear to me {to do something}]. If a man does something and someone 
asks him why he did it, he will reply to him “It was my ćeif to do so” 
[Tako mi je bilo po ćeifu]. Similarly, if one asks him why he did not do 
something, he will say, “Fere was no ćeif in it for me” [nije mi bilo po 
ćeifu] – Fen peaceful Bosnia. (4) 



 

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We see in this passage how the pan-Ottoman concept of ćeif can also become the 
utterly unique Bosniak concept of ćeif, and how a Bosniak word can be so foreign 
as to be untranslatable, but also common enough to compare easily to similar 
Croatian and Western European examples. In this article, I suggest that by 
depicting the ways that coffee culture was embedded into Bosniak life, these lay 
Croatian folklorists were attempting to convey the ćeif that comes with drinking 
coffee. As with the concept of ćeif, in portraying Bosniak coffee culture the 
scholars struck a balance between folklife depictions that celebrated a novel 
phenomenon embedded with deep cultural meaning, while also employing a 
romanticized ethnographic gaze that brought with it a range of ethno-national 
political leanings and Orientalist biases. 

Accounts of Bosniak Coffee Culture in the HAZU archives 

Fe accounts selected for this article are derived from published and 
unpublished manuscripts submitted from lay folklore collectors to two, early 
nineteenth-century, Zagreb-based projects—the folk songs collections of the 
publishing house Matica hrvatska (1896-present) and the folklore and folklife 
journal, =e Review on Folk Life and Customs of the South Slavs (Zbornik za 
narodni život i običaje Južnih Slavena; 1896-present; hereafter ‘=e Review’). 
While these two projects have their own unique histories, their contemporaneous 
creation and early mandates are built on very similar programs. Fe currents of 
their history further converged in the middle of the twentieth century when the 
two collections were united in the archive of the Department of Ethnology at the 
Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Hrvatska Akademija Znanosti i 
Umjetnosti, or HAZU) [Primorac 2010: 10]. Fe three passages selected for this 
article are all built on a model that was formulated by the earliest editors of =e 
Review, such that, for the purposes of this piece, only that history, and not that of 
the folk song collection, will be discussed [see Primorac 2010: 13-17; Velzek 
1950].  

=e Review’s earliest editors envisioned the publications as presenting a 
tapestry of South Slavic cultural variation in the spirit of the Pan-Slavic 
unification efforts that flourished at the time. Fese efforts were tempered, and 
variously supported and undermined by contemporaneous ethno-nationalist 
movements. Whether articulated in larger- (Pan-Slavic, Illyrian, Yugoslav) or 
smaller-scale (Greater-Serbian, Greater-Croatian) iterations, the aims were the 
same—some level of unification and autonomous rule of linguistically- and 
culturally-related South Slavic peoples across exogenous imperial divisions. Fe 
Review was built on a grass-roots model where public calls printed in newspapers 
and special-interest papers encouraged priests, teachers, peasants, and any other 
motivated lay-collectors to enter their local communities to collect ethnological 
and ethnographic data. Aided by a collector’s guide published by the journal, 
these intrepid public scholars collected a wide range of folklore, folklife, and 
anthropological data on various communities and submitted them to the journal 
in hopes that their work might be worthy of monetary remuneration and 



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publication, in part or in whole, in the journal [See Čapo-Žmegac 1997; Jurić 
2020; Primorac 2010; Radić 1897; Rihtman-Auguštin 2004].  

Fe passages that are presented here have been selected for their focus on 
Bosniak coffee culture and practice and for the unique view each presents, both 
into that world and through the lens of the outsider, Croatian collectors who 
gathered the material. Fe second and third passages are only retained in 
manuscript form in the archive of the Department of Ethnology at HAZU in 
Zagreb and have never been published. Fe manuscript from which the first and 
longest passage is derived has been published in the original Croatian numerous 
times, but to my knowledge has never been translated into English. All of the 
translations in this article are my own.  

Coffee in the Ottoman Empire 

Although the pharmacological properties of the coffee bean may have been 
known to Arab scientists as early as the tenth century [Weinberg and Bealer 2001: 
5-6], the common practice of drinking coffee can only be firmly attested in the 
historical record to the middle of the fifteenth century. First cultivated from wild 
stock in modern-day Ethiopia [Clarence-Smith and Topik 2003: 23-25], the bean 
(called bunn, perhaps the corrupted source of the West’s use of the word “bean” 
in place of what is technically the plant’s seed) was brought to Sufi monasteries 
in Yemen sometime in the mid-1400s by adherents of the order. Fese men 
brewed what was likely the first coffee beverage to fuel their nighttime dhikr 
devotions [Hattox 1985: 14, 24, 26, 74-76; Weinberg and Bealer 2001: 3]. By the 
end of the fifteenth century and the first decade of the following, those same Sufis 
had brought the drink respectively to Mecca and Cairo [Hattox 1985: 26]. In both 
locations, the beverage quickly diffused into the general population through these 
men’s regular, diurnal business interactions. Fe first Ottoman citizens tasted the, 
at that time likely, green drink during the reign of Sultan Selim I (1512-20) when 
the Sublime Porte stationed soldiers in Egypt and the Hejaz [Kreševljaković 1935: 
161], but it did not physically enter the Empire until 1521 during the reign of 
Suleiman the Magnificent [Krstić 1974: 72]. (5) When the Sultan’s fleet 
garrisoned the Yemen littoral in 1538, he gained access to, and later control of, 
the mountain villages where coffea arabica was being grown [Hathaway 2006: 
161-2]. Fis acquisition quickly ushered a precipitous expansion of the bean 
throughout the empire and with it the social institution of the coffeehouse.  

On the world stage, the Ottoman annexation of Yemen was serendipitous. 
One year before acquiring the region, a war had erupted in Ethiopia, with Oromo 
invaders disrupting the coffee trade there [Clarence-Smith and Topik 2003: 52]. 
Upon acquisition of the territory, the Ottomans became the key exporter of the 
bean over land and sea through their Yemeni and Egyptian ports [Hathaway 
2006], whence it traveled to the rest of Europe. Fis new revenue largely 
supplanted the spice trade that had been re-routed with da Gama’s voyage around 
the Cape of Good Hope [Faroqhi 2000].  



 

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As Ottoman trade networks expanded, they attempted, unsuccessfully, to 
protect their monopoly on coffee by prohibiting the export of living plants and 
fertile seeds [Tucker 2011: 36]. Soon, however, viable seeds and seedlings were 
smuggled out of the country and spread to the Indies and the Caribbean by Dutch 
and English traders [Clarence-Smith and Topik 2003: 22; Tucker 2011: 37-40], 
enabling an international spread of the plant and establishing the global adoption 
of coffee into the modern period [Cowan 2005: 55-77; Faroqhi 2000: 20]. (6) Fe 
extensive maritime trade routes that brought coffee to the wider world also 
delivered goods in the opposite direction. In the year 1600 or 1601, English 
merchants from the American colonies brought coffee’s constant mate, smoking 
tobacco, from the new world to the Ottoman Empire [Lewis 1963: 134]. (7) In its 
new home, tobacco was first employed as a medicine against certain illnesses, 
before catching on as a simple pleasure enjoyed with coffee [Krstić 1974: 72]. 

While coffee arrived to cosmopolitan Istanbul as early as 1534 
[Kreševljaković 1935: 161], regular trade only allowed the first coffeehouses to 
be erected sometime between 1543 and 1555 [Âli 2003: 129; Kātib Chelebi 1957: 
60; Peçevi 1999 I: 349]. Historians offer these two conflicting dates for the arrival 
of two Syrian traders, Hakam from Aleppo and Shams from Damascus, who 
purportedly opened Istanbul’s first coffeehouse. At a time when Mi’mâr Sinân, 
Suleiman’s royal chief architect, was expanding the capital with his austere 
religious buildings, coffeehouses were propagating exponentially throughout the 
city. By the time British colonel and author Charles White [1845 I: 282] gave his 
impressions of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1840s, he estimated Istanbul to 
have no fewer than 2500 coffeehouses. Fese establishments were lively, with 
denizens attending daily to smoke their chibouks (a long-stemmed smoking pipe) 
(8) and drink their fincans (small, handle-less coffee cups) (9) of the beverage (see 
Image 1). In an Ottoman context, coffee’s earliest dissemination became 
particularly linked to the culture of Turkish intellectuals [Elezović 1938: 634] who 
used the stimulating drink and the socializing praxis built around it to stoke their 
imaginations and increase their productivity. As more coffeehouses opened and 
attendance became more routine, Istanbul’s café culture acquired a unique 
connection to the city’s various tradesmen’s guilds and particularly to the furlough 
financial endeavors of the city’s Janissaries [Çaksu 2007]. 

Beyond Istanbul and throughout the entirety of the empire, coffeehouses 
served a much larger social function. Fough members of every social class 
visited them, these humble premises became the primary site of male socialization 
for the lower and middle classes. Fese groups generally owned houses that were 
too small to afford them adequate room for properly hosting guests—that is, a 
sizeable selamlık as opposed to the private portion of the home, the haremlik. 
Fus, for poorer citizens of the empire, male socialization was extended into 
public houses, freeing their domiciles for women’s socialization [Mikhail 2007: 
147-8]. As early as the late sixteenth century, the drink had become, as White 
[1845 I: 280] aptly put it, “the solace of the rich and the principal sustenance of 
the poor,” and the coffeehouse had assumed its social role as the revolutionary 
site for open social, political, and intellectual expression where various social 



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classes mingled in novel and radical ways [Cowan 2005: 152-92; Hattox 1988: 
91-8;  

Image 1. A man drinks a findžan of coffee at an open-air market in the western 
Bosnian city of Cazin in 1905. =e džezva in which the coffee was prepared sits 

in front of him [Hairlahović 2017]  

Tucker 2011: 53-6]. Fis social praxis was perhaps even more revolutionary in 
the Islamic world than it proved to be later in Europe and America. In the Near 
East, where taverns were deemed illicit and restaurant culture was largely 
unknown [Hattox 1985: 89, 125], this unprecedented growth of public gathering 
places was an alarming shift in the social fabric. In the Ottoman Empire, where 
the tenets of Islam strictly circumscribed access to alcohol, the coffeehouse 
offered the social function of a tavern, and indeed modeled its structure to some 
degree on those institutions, while remaining uniquely free of the overt stigma 
that accompanied patronizing such establishments. (10) 



 

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Coffee in the Western Balkans 

By at least the 1570s, the coffeehouse had made its way to the western 
reaches of the Balkans. (11) Fe great Ottoman historian (and Bosniak by 
matriline) İbrahim Peçevi (BCMS, Ibrahim Alajbegović Pečevija) related an 
account of visiting an elaborately furnished coffeehouse in Sarajevo in 1591. Later 
scholars have asserted that this café was likely predated by similar, unattested 
establishments in Belgrade, Sofia and Skopje [Elezović 1938: 632-3]. Fis early 
migration of coffee into Eastern and Central Europe reached as far as Hungary, 
where Peçevi recounted Ottoman Turks drinking the beverage on 4 August 1598 
on the frontlines of their unsuccessful military campaign [633]. By the turn of the 
seventeenth century, coffeehouses had proliferated throughout all areas of the 
Balkans under Turkish authority; historians have uncovered a wealth of 
manuscripts mentioning cafés in some of the smallest towns in South Slavic 
regions, as well as accounts from Western travel writers who noted coffee being 
drunk in numerous Bosnian, Serbian, and Macedonian cities [Vinaver 1965: 331-
32]. Fis spread coincided with the introduction of tobacco to the region. Soon 
after its arrival to the empire, stores in the Balkans were already selling tobacco 
pipes and the men attending local cafés could be found “drinking” tobacco with 
their coffees [Fotić 2011: 90]. (12) 

Fe earliest proliferation of coffee, however, was tied directly to the Muslim 
population of the empire, starting with those Ottoman Turks who had immigrated 
to or administered the holdings of the Porte’s Rumelian Eyalet [lit. Roman 
Province] and quickly passing into the habits of local groups, like Bosniaks, who 
had converted to Islam. While Western-Balkan coffeehouses were indeed sites for 
the mixing of social classes—Peçevi noted that the Sarajevo café had various sets 
of divans [BCMS sećija] reserved for particular social classes (cf. Hangi’s 
account below)—this mixing did not include other religious groups. Since the 
drinking of alcohol is highly discouraged in Islam, and religious mixing was 
frowned upon under the divisive organization of the millet system, cafés in South 
Slavic regions were the predominant habitat of Muslim males. (13) Fough non-
Muslims were not banned from entering Muslim coffeehouses, such mixing seems 
to have seldom occurred [Fotić 2011: 92]. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth 
century, most Christian households in Bosnia drank little coffee, often only 
keeping some in the house in case of hosting Muslim guests [Vinaver 1965: 345]. 
Fis segregation still held in the early twentieth century, with religious groups 
largely attending separate establishments to enjoy their coffee. Only in the inter-
war period did this practice begin to slightly diminish [Murko 1951: 42, 334, 354-
57 371-2], before the ideological push of “brotherhood and unity” in the second 
Yugoslavia relegated such divisions into the realm of backward archaism. 

Fat is not to say that the Christian raja in the empire were impervious to 
the allure of the black bean in earlier centuries. In Serbia, coffee drinking was 
slowly adopted into Christian practice starting in the eighteenth century. 
Surprisingly, as in the Islamic world, the first Christians of the empire to begin 
drinking coffee were priests in local monasteries [Elezović 1938: 634]. 



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Aleksandar Fotić [2011: 94] has revealed how the elites of the Serbian Orthodox 
church very early embraced coffee drinking and the smoking of tobacco in 
mimicry of Turkish high culture. By the middle of the eighteenth century, cafés 
had become a regular locus of culture in Belgrade, though the establishments were 
most often opened and run by Jews and Aromanians [Vinaver 1965: 336]. As far 
afield as in Buda, Serbs had taken coffee drinking as a regular habit [336] and by 
the 1780s travelers to Serbia remarked on the central role cafés served in the social 
life of every city [341]. Fe practice seems to have been fully cemented in local 
public and private practice by the time of the first Serbian Uprising (1804-1813)—
a predicament given that political tensions with the Ottomans made it difficult to 
obtain the bean [346]. 

In neighboring Venetian- and Habsburg-controlled South Slavic regions, 
adoption of coffee drinking lagged considerably. Coffee was unheard of in 
Dubrovnik until the seventeenth century, where it is first attested as a trade good 
in transit from Egypt into Bosnia via the maritime republic. Later, the drink 
became better known in the city, but only as a beverage that Turks shared with 
Dubrovnik emissaries when the latter conducted business in the Ottoman Empire 
[Vinaver 1965: 333]. Coffee made its first appearance in the republic sometime 
between 1635 and 1640. By the 1660s, it had gained the status of a luxury item 
that was often given as a gift. Only in the eighteenth century did the beverage 
become a common drink, attested by retail figures for coffee appurtenances; yet, 
even then, import numbers reveal its popularity as paling in comparison with 
neighboring regions [334]. Cafés in the Republic also shirked any role in social 
reformation. While Bosnian cafés served as social and political forums for male 
socialization across class boundaries, Dubrovnik coffeehouses remained the 
purview of only nobility and upper-class townsmen for some time [Fotić 2011: 
91-2]. Rules for coffeehouses in Dubrovnik were set soon after their initial 
appearance and curtailed many of the habits that they fostered elsewhere: Fey 
had to close early; talk of religion and politics was prohibited, as was the reading 
of foreign newspapers; all gambling and games of chance were prohibited; and a 
certain level of social standing of attendants was de jure enforced when not de 
facto. One coffeehouse set firm guidelines for excluding “lower people”—here 
noted specifically as Jews and actors—from entering [Vinaver 1965: 340 n.83].  

Despite a long history of war- and peace-time interactions with the 
Ottomans, the Habsburg Empire seems to have received its coffee in a completely 
roundabout manner. Fe first coffeehouse to open in Zagreb appeared around 
1749, and this establishment was built on a western model derived from Austrian 
example [337]. While most South Slavic regions received their coffee as imports 
from Alexandria, Egypt, Habsburg coffee was most often a Dutch import from 
Java [339]. Fe Habsburgs imposed a strict imperial monopoly on the sale of the 
bean, which produced a lively trade for smugglers bringing contraband coffee and 
sugar across the Bosnian-Croatian border where their product immediately 
doubled in price [Kreševljaković 1935:165 n.45]. Fough belated, here too the 
drink spread rapidly and by the end of the eighteenth century it had become a 



 

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crucial part of social life in all the major Habsburg South Slavic centers (Zagreb, 
Osijek, Novi Sad, Zemun, Sremski Karlovci, etc.) [Vinaver 1965: 337]. 

In the selected passages that follow, we return to the initial site of 
introduction to the region. Into the homes and coffeehouses of the Bosnian 
Muslim population as witnessed by Croatian folklore and folklife collectors. 

Passage #1: Antun Hangi – A Description of a Bosnian Coffeehouse 

Fe following account is taken from a book [Hangi 1906] that began as one 
half of a manuscript submitted to Matica hrvatska [Hangi 1898]. Fe work was 
collected by Antun Hangi (1866-1909), a Croatian school teacher who moved to 
Bosnia to find work after the territory was ceded to the Habsburgs in 1878. Born 
in the town of Petrinja and educated in Zagreb, Hangi headed to Bosnia in 1890 
to assume a teaching position in the town of Maglaj where he professed [1906: 5; 
n.d.a: 197] that he fell in love with the “sober life” of the Muslims there “because 
of their sincerity and honesty.” He later taught in Livno, Banja Luka, Bihać and 
Sarajevo where he died from tuberculosis at the age of 43 [Kajmaković 1990: 7; 
Softić 1985: 161].  

In a letter to Matica hrvatska he [Hangi n.d.a: 197] described his shock and 
wonder at the culture he found among the Bosniaks when he first moved to the 
region. In 1888 he began collecting various material for his work, predominantly 
in Banja Luka as well as Bihać [Hangi n.d.b: 198], which he hoped to publish in 
a single book composed of three sections: Fe first would be an ethnographic and 
folklife work titled “Fe Life and Customs of the Muhammedans in Bosnia and 
Herzegovina” [Život i običaji muhamedanaca u Bosni i Hercegovini] [n.d.a: 196; 
n.d.b: 198] which was informed by =e Review’s format (given the title that he 
has lifted from it and his admission of reading the work [Hangi 1906: 5]); Fe 
second section was planned as a selection of folk songs titled, “Harem folk songs,” 
which he had collected predominantly from poorer Muslim women and some 
Catholics who had served in wealthier Muslim households [n.d.b: 198]; Fe final 
section would be a concomitant dictionary of Turkish-loans and regional words 
that provided clarity to the other two sections [n.d.a: 196]. Hangi also took 
photographs throughout Bihać and Banja Luka that he hoped would add color to 
the pages of the work [n.d.a: 196; n.d.b: 198]. 

For their part, Matica hrvatska relied on one of their members with extensive 
experience collecting folk songs in the region, Dr. Luka Marjanović, to assess 
Hangi’s work and guide his manuscript to completion [Hangi n.d.a: 196; 
Marjanović n.d.: 9]. In the end, Matica retained the songs he sent them, but only 
published seventeen of the songs in their larger folk song collection [Andrić 1909; 
1914; 1942; Marjanović n.d.: 9; Smičiklas 1899: 1 Softić 1985: 170]. Hangi’s 
prose manuscript was deemed less valuable to the group and returned to him per 
his request [Hangi n.d.a: 197; n.d.b: 198-9]. After publishing sections of his work 
in Bosnian periodicals, the work was finally published in full as a book, complete 
with elaborate illustrations and some of Hangi’s photographs in 1899. Fe book 
was instantly successful and reprinted in a second edition in 1906. In respect to 



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the subject of his work, and to shifting discourse coming out of Sarajevo, he 
altered the name of his piece for the second edition, replacing the derogatory and 
dated term ‘Muhammedans’ [Muhamedanci] with ‘Muslims’ [Muslimani]. Fis 
passage from his work [1906: 78-84], describes the look, workings, and culture 
of a Bosniak coffeehouse, presumably in the Bosanska Krajina region. 

Since our Muslims have their serfs, who work in their stead, they need 
not worry as much about their existence as Christians do. Because of this, 
they have plenty of time for gathering and conversing. Feir dearest 
meeting places are the stores of Muslim merchants and coffeehouses 
[kafane], or better cafés [kahve], as they also call them thus. (14) Fese 
coffeehouses are not the same as those in the West, but rather little, sooty 
rooms. In them the proprietor sits at the hearth and “bakes” the coffee. 
Fere are a large number of cafés in Bosnia and Herzegovina and one 
would not be much mistaken were one to say that nearly every tenth or 
twentieth Muslim house is a café. Fe interiors of Bosnian cafés are very 
simple. Divans [sećije] line the walls, upon which are placed pillows 
stuffed with wool, reed grass, or hay. Over the pillows is spread blue or 
red loden [čoha]. Only in one corner of the divan is found a nicer, taller 
pillow, a proper mattress for the divan. Fat spot is always reserved for 
one exceptional Aga or Beg who frequents that café every day as though 
it were his own. Fe entire café is covered in cattail mats [hasura], while 
only the nicest have both cattail mats and rugs [ćilimi].  

Fey like to build cafés above water, such that either the entire building 
is above water, or else that one section is reposed along the bank while 
the other rests upon strong pilings [direci], posts that protrude from the 
water. Otherwise, they situate them on some raised area or hillock from 
which opens a beautiful vista on all sides, for our Muslim is gladly 
carried away by flights of fancy and those types of locations are most 
conducive to that. 

In many of the more common Bosnian cafés one may also find a barber, 
such that, beyond drinking coffee, one may also receive a haircut and 
shave (see Image 2). Such cafés are also called barbershops [berbernice]. 
Barbershops are small wooden shacks, regularly found in the market 
district, either standing alone, or else sharing their roof with another 
shop. Barbers rent such shops and then shave and cook coffee, or else 
some coffeehouse-keepers will rent that shop and then invite a barber to 
join him so that the rent is paid more easily. Fus together they ply their 
trades. 



 

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12 

Image 2. Painting of a barber at work included in Antun Hangi’s 1899 text, =e 
Life and Customs of the Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina. [1906: 86]  

Let’s take a peek at that café or, if you will, barbershop and observe it 
from both outside and in. Fe roof on such barbershops is most often 
short and juts out well into the street. Its door is loose and short and its 
windows are dirty and small, very small. Inside, the barbershop is packed 
with yellow earth or, in some, there is a very primitive plank floor. Fe 
“architect” has laid-out a number of fat planks against one another, nailed 
them to the joists; then the floor is done. But when the planks dry, you 
can easily see what is hidden below them. In some barbershops, the walls 
are whitewashed, while in others the planks are bare and are regularly 
plastered-over with various papers, mostly newspapers and price lists. In 
some you will find one or two pictures with or without frames. On the 
shelves of nearly every barbershop the diligent barber has arranged his 
ibriks [metal ewers] and little džezvas [coffee pots], and beside them 
stand bottles of lemonade and rose water; beside the bottles are little tin 
boxes, full of ground [lit. pulverized] coffee and sugar—a little bit of 
everything. 

In every barbershop, the thing that will immediately catch your eye is a 
large Bosnian earthen oven with stove tiles, in which a fire burns summer 
and winter, from early morning until late at night. By the fire you will 



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always find a large vessel—usually half the size of a tin petroleum 
container—a container in which water is heated. Beside the vessel are 
arranged a number of ibriks of various sizes in which the water is heated 
for cooking the coffee. Should a customer desire coffee in a hurry, the 
barber or coffee-man adds a spoon or two of toza (ground coffee) in that 
ibrik which the customer requests. When the water boils a second time, 
the coffee is done. 

Across every barbershop, nearly from wall to wall is extended a soha, a 
strong, chased tree trunk or other beam, just like in a Slavonian peasant 
home, and a small cauldron with a little spigot depending from it by a 
chain or rope. When the barber finishes his work, and if the customer 
wishes, he will move that cauldron directly above the customer’s head, 
he will open that spigot and immediately a warm stream of water pours 
down to his head. Fen you enjoy it like that, underneath a small 
waterfall, wrapped in a white or multi-colored, but completely clean 
sheet, or without. Afterwards, the barber dries your hair. Fen you sit 
where you like, light a cigarette, order a coffee and wait while you dry 
off. Fen you head home, beautified and rejuvenated.  

It’s a unique life in those coffeehouses. Some Muslims enter the café and 
sit on a divan; one leans his back on the wall, one leans his elbow on a 
pillow or reclines on a window; others sit on a divan and take out their 
tobacco pouch to fill their pipe or chibouk, or else some youth grabs his 
“box” to role a “cigar” [cigarette] of tobacco, and only then will they 
order a coffee.  

Regulars, particularly more esteemed guests, have their permanent spots 
on the divans, while newcomers and less notable individuals sit wherever 
a spot is available. If you have come to the café of an older coffeehouse-
keeper who carries on the old customs, he will never ask you what you 
want. Instead, sit where you wish, smoke and converse as you like, he 
won’t even come near you, let alone ask you what you would like unless 
you call to him or cajole him; he really won’t.  

In all the cafés where our Muslims gather, it is usually very calm; visitors 
calmly gather, quietly converse and peacefully part. While they drink 
coffee and smoke tobacco they speak about everything and all things, but 
most happily and often about politics. While they converse, they remain 
very serious, and some truly dignified, as though they’re discussing God 
knows what important topic. Some of them will even, when they’ve said 
something important, stroke their long, usually pointed beards as a sign 
that they’ve spoken the truth.  



 

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14 

While they’re talking thus, a stranger or some unfamiliar man enters into 
the café. Whether he be Christian or Muslim, the conversation grows 
quiet or else completely stops. If they are talking about an, according to 
their opinion, important topic, then some foreigner stumbles into the 
café, especially a “Schwab,” [Austrian or German] and greets everyone 
present, normally they all stop talking and only a couple of them here and 
there begrudgingly return the greeting. While such a man sits amongst 
them, they often change the theme of their conversation and speak about 
something different. Fen, all the while stroking their beards, they look at 
one another as though they are asking with their looks, “Who is this? 
Where’s he from and what kind of work has brought him here?” 

Every foreigner who enters a Bosnian café for the first time is struck, 
before anything else, by the many little chalk marks on the walls, beams, 
or on the ceiling. Whence these marks and what purpose do they serve? 
As with us, so too and with our Muslims, credit plays a very important 
role in public life, including cafés. Regular guests, namely those who 
come every day to a café, rarely ever pay immediately for their coffee, 
but rather pay after some time, usually around Saint George’s Day [April 
23rd or May 6th] (15) or before Bajram [Eid al-Adha]. (16) So that the 
proprietor won’t forget before then how many coffees each of his guests 
has drunk, he writes—either on a wall, a beam, or the ceiling—the name 
of the debtor in Turkish letters [Arabic script], or, if not that, then he 
makes some kind of symbol in place of the name that only he and his 
customer understand. When such a guest has drunk his coffee, the 
proprietor makes a mark beside his name or that sign for how many 
ibriks or fildžans of coffee he has drunk.  

What is owed to the proprietor is conscientiously paid. At least I, to date, 
have never heard a coffeehouse-keeper complain of a customer who 
hasn’t paid for his coffee. When someone pays his debt, the proprietor 
wipes those marks away with his fingers or a wet cloth, but not the name 
or sign. Fe “ledger” carries on, for it is rare for a regular customer to 
leave his coffee-man for another. 

Particularly in one café in N., a small town not far from the [river] Sava, 
I saw something unique and for a foreigner very interesting. One day I 
was traveling by wagon from B. in Slavonia and came before dawn to N. 
Since all the inns were still closed, I dropped into a café, as candles were 
already burning there. It was cold out, but in the café the fire in the 
“hearth” was joyfully blazing; a true delight and pleasure for a chilled 
traveler.  

Fe ceiling of that café was quite vaulted, which is truly a rare exception 
in Bosnian cafés. In the center of the café stood a plump coffeehouse-



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keeper atop some type of chest. In his hand he held a long pole and at the 
tip of the pole was a sharpened stick of chalk. Beside him stood his lad, 
and everything he’s saying, the owner is marking down and marking 
down. All the walls in that café were already full of markings, only on 
the ceiling remained some empty space. It’s a true wonder that this 
diligent proprietor of ours could find his way in that forest of names, 
symbols, markings and scratches.  

When I entered that café, I greeted the both of them with a “Good 
morning!” Fe owner just looked at me from atop his chest completely 
disinterested. I sit on a divan and then just watch what they’re up to. Fe 
owner, just as though I’m not even in the room, asks, “And Suljo?” Fe 
youth responds, “Five.” “Huso?” “Free,” and just like that in order. In 
other words, the owner left early the night before to retire and in his place 
the youth stayed in the café. Now he’s telling him how much each person 
drank last night. 

I wanted to strike up a little conversation with the proprietor. I asked this 
and that and he responds to everything through gritted teeth, “Yeah!” or 
“Nope!” or “Oh yeah!” Seeing that there’s no conversation to be had 
with him today, I finished up my coffee, paid, and left to an inn.  

In larger places there are some nicely decorated cafés in which the 
furnishings are oriental or à la française; here, there are not just divans 
and cushions, but also tables and chairs. In those cafés there is the 
greatest order and cleanliness; in more common cafés, cleanliness is an 
incidental thing. But in one and the other cafés one thing is the same, and 
that is excellent coffee. Even in the most elegant European hotel or 
coffeehouse you cannot find such good coffee as in the humblest Bosnian 
café. 

Fe coffee in Bosnian cafés is so good because our coffeehouse-keepers 
know how to roast it well. When roasting, they never let the coffee 
completely blacken or over-roast. It’s best to let it just get a little ruddy 
and then it’s ready. Over-roasted coffee not only loses its strength, but 
also its scent, and that’s why coffee in [European] coffeehouses isn’t as 
flavorful as in [Bosnian] cafés. When the proprietor has roasted the 
coffee, he places it in a mortar, a hollowed-out young linden or cherry 
trunk, or else in a hollowed-out stone and grinds it with an iron bar, a pry 
bar, until it’s completely ground. Fen he sifts it through a very thick 
screen, grinding the remainder over again until it has been pounded into a 
powder. He places this powdered coffee into tin containers and closes 
them tightly, that way the coffee doesn’t lose its strength and scent. 
Because of this too, it is much more pleasant than milled coffee. 



 

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16 

Coffee is brewed or, as the Muslims say, baked in džezvas or in ibriks, 
and when they’ve baked it, they pour it into fildžans. (17) Fildžans are 
little, circular, porcelain vessels, in white, red, green, or blue colors. 
Finer, particularly white, fildžans have a golden rim around the top. A 
fildžan of coffee with sugar is worth four hellers, without sugar only two. 
(18) Whoever wants to drink very strong coffee can ask for special gift 
[mahsuzija], that is, a double-measure of ground coffee, but this is 
doubly-expensive. 

In more common cafés, the proprietor gives his customer his coffee such 
that he accepts it from below with three fingers—thumb, index and 
middle—and while taking, it he touches his left hand to his chest. When 
you drink this good coffee, it is lovely to light up, but for this you won’t 
need a match. As soon as you’ve taken a cigarette into your hand, here’s 
the obliging coffeehouse-keeper or his man to serve you with a charcoal. 
In more refined cafés, as in ours [i.e. Croatian/Western], the proprietor 
serves the coffee on a platter with a glass of cold water placed beside it.  

Coffee is a very beloved drink of our Muslims. Fey say that coffee is not 
only a pleasant, but also a very healthy drink. Fey say it cools a man in 
the summer, warms him in the winter, freshens him in the morning, and 
strengthens him in the evening. Fat’s why when someone receives you 
in his guest room [ahar], he will serve you coffee, if you come to his 
store, he’ll treat you to a coffee. If you buy or sell something, get married 
or have some kind of celebration, someone will give you coffee.  

In Bosnia and Herzegovina there are many Muslims who can drink a 
great amount of coffee; it doesn’t even affect their nerves. Not a one has 
ever complained that it made him jittery. I knew a hodja in Livno 
[present day Tomislavgrad] who drank between fifty and one hundred 
fildžans of black coffee nearly every night of Ramaḍān [BCMS 
Ramazan], and smoked as many cigarettes, and didn’t even feel that he 
had drunk anything. Our modern man, who is already eternally anxious 
anyway, would die or go crazy from so much caffeine and nicotine. 
Coffee doesn’t harm the Bosnian Muslim since he’s grown accustomed 
to it since his childhood. He begins to drink coffee when he is two or 
three years old and he drinks it with the same relish as everything else in 
his life. He does not imbibe alcoholic drinks, nor do great existential 
troubles torture him. Aside from that, he doesn’t feel the need for back-
breaking work. He lives peacefully and contentedly with what God has 
given him. What use is it to him, in the end, to worry about superficial, 
worldly troubles when everything is already fated in advance? (19) It’s 
no wonder, then, that he has nerves of steel and that coffee and tobacco 
cannot harm him. He drinks coffee from early dawn, as soon as he opens 
his eyes, until late in the evening when he lays down for bed. When day 



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has barely dawned he’s leaving the mosque or finished his morning 
prayer at home and headed for the café to drink his fildžan of coffee and 
smoke a tobacco cigarette. Only after this does he set off to carry out his 
day’s work.  

In the winter, Muslims head very early to sleep, and so very early rise. 
Since they cannot await the sabah [morning prayer] at home, some as 
early as around four o’ clock after midnight head to a café where, with 
coffee and conversation, they wait until the dawn breaks and the Muezzin 
calls to sabah from a minaret. After lunch and after dinner they head 
again to the café and there they pass the time in various social games, 
coffee and friendly conversation until akšam or jacija [dusk and evening 
prayers]. (20)  

Merchants and artisans cannot go to the cafés every evening, and even 
less during the day. Because of this, their friends and acquaintances come 
to their shops, and there pass the time in conversation. So that our 
merchant or artisan need not send someone throughout the day to a café 
or else call the coffeehouse-keeper to him, he has connected his shop to 
the café with a cord. When he wants coffee, he pulls on the cord and in 
the café a small bell rings. Fe coffee-man recognizes each shop’s bell 
and takes coffee to him whose bell has rung. Whoever has been to a truly 
Muslim town in Bosnia has seen those cords stretching across the streets 
and has wondered why such a small place has need for so many 
telephone lines. 

Aside from coffee, they particularly love tobacco. Fey also begin 
smoking in childhood and continue to smoke as long as they live. Both 
men and women smoke tobacco, young and old, the rich and the poor. 
Only the children of respectable and notable parents will not light-up in 
front of their parents nor other prominent people, since this does not befit 
well-raised children. Youths and women smoke only cigarettes, married 
men smoke cigarettes, pipes and čibuks [see note 9], and old men on top 
of all that will also smoke a hookah [nargile]. Fose who do not smoke 
tobacco instead snort snuff and snus. 

As mentioned above, compared to many contemporary Western accounts of 
coffeehouses and coffee culture in Muslim lands, Hangi’s description is pleasantly 
detailed and informative. From architecture and décor to ambiance and 
appurtenances, the coffeehouse’s description is rich and informative. Readers 
learn how the coffee is roasted, ground and prepared, the prices of coffee, as well 
as the range of drinks on offer—lemonade, rose water, coffee with or without 
sugar and even what might be termed a “double shot.” Fey learn here the 
difference between refined and simple coffeehouses and even considerations for 
ideal locations to build cafés. But what stands out even more clearly is the 



 

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18 

revealing descriptions of the culture of the coffeehouse. Hangi brings readers into 
the building with him where they learn practices of etiquette and commensality, 
where to sit, how to hail the barista and how to politely receive their drink [cf. 
Long 2000; Shuman 1983]. Fe passage details who smokes what in the 
coffeehouse, how much coffee is drunk, and at what age these habits begin, linking 
the drinking of coffee to life-course considerations. Readers are introduced to the 
interplay between coffee drinking and grooming practices through the division of 
work shared by the coffee-man and the barber, as well as the hierarchies that exist 
among attendants and the culture of devotion that creates a bond between café and 
customer. He describes conversation habits, the culture of exclusion that arises at 
the arrival of a stranger and the elaborate system of chalk-mark ledgers which 
politely keeps debts anonymous while also tying consumer habits into seasonal 
cycles—debts are paid at festival times. Such thick description (albeit lacking the 
informant input that would make it Geertz’s) was uncommon for accounts of 
foodways produced in this era and creates a style of narrative that made Hangi’s 
text widely successful in and outside of Bosnia upon publication. 

Fe Bosnian Coffeehouse  

In the Ottoman Empire it was common to refer to coffeehouses simply by 
the name ‘coffee.’ Fis practice begins with the Arabs and their original naming 
(qahwah), carries through the Turkish borrowing (kahve), and into the BCMS 
languages whose members use three dialect variants that have come to be 
standardized by nation: kava in Croatian, kafa in Serbian and Montenegrin and 
kahva in Bosnian. (21) Coffeehouses in the region also acquired more particular 
names through shortening and elision of the Turkish compound noun kahvehane 
[lit. coffeehouse], which produced the most common name for a coffeehouse, 
kahvana/kavana/kafana, and which persists into the present day and generally 
denotes a locality with an old-style ambiance akin to an English public house and 
which may still prepare coffee in the Turkish style. Fis compound noun also 
produced a diminutive, kafić, which is often applied to smaller and more modern 
establishments in an Italian/Western European style and with an obligatory 
espresso bar [cf. Bringa 1995: 111-12].  

For most of its history, coffee in the Western Balkans has been brewed in a 
traditional Turkish manner—water is boiled in a džezva, a small, metal coffee pot 
with a long handle and a protruding lip for pouring, or, in the past, optionally in 
an ibrik, a metal pitcher or ewer with a wide base for heat distribution and a 
narrow spout, (22) which was used to serve larger groups (see Image 3). Ground 
coffee is then added to the hot water which is mixed lightly and returned to the 
heat one-to-three times for short periods to produce a slight froth. Fe coffee is 
then served piping hot, today into demitasse cups, but traditionally into small 
findžans for drinking. 



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Image 3. Illustration of a kahvedžija preparing coffee at his large earthen oven. 

[Hangi 1906: 79] 

In nineteenth-century Bosnia, every district [mahala] of every major city 
had at least one coffeehouse, while the merchant districts [čaršija] were said to 
have one on every street. Fere was also a café in every village inn/caravanserai 
[han], as well as in most barbershops [berbernica]. As Hangi describes, the 
winter, when most seasonal work was suspended, was a particularly lively time 
for coffeehouse attendance. Coffeehouse owners/keepers [kahvedžija, Turk. 
kahveci] would regularly hire musicians and groups to perform with the šargija, 
the saz/bağlama or other popular instruments of the time. Attendees would also 
entertain themselves by telling riddles, jokes and tales, playing games—checkers, 
backgammon, ring games, and others, as well as billiards in the finer 
establishments that could afford a table—and discussing politics and current 



 

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20 

events. Esteemed locals and travelers might relate their personal experiences, and 
there were even occasional performances by magicians [karađoz] [Kreševljaković 
1935: 162]. (23) 

Coffeehouses were also home to more formalized entertainers. Fose who 
knew Turkish, Persian or Arabic were often asked to relate popular folk and fairy 
tales from written works into the local vernacular and were usually paid for this 
entertainment. Fis practice was referred to as “telling tavarih” derived from the 
Arabic term for histories, chronicles, or annals [pl. tawārīkh] [162]. More 
importantly, through the winter, most coffeehouse owners kept singers of epic 
songs on retainer to entertain their guests with tales of ancient heroes sung to the 
accompaniment of the gusle (a single-stringed fiddle), the two-stringed tambura-
samica (a simple lute reminiscent of the Turkish cura saz), or various other local 
lutes (šargija, saz, etc.) [see Murko 1951: 322-39]. Fis practice found its apex in 
the month of Ramazan [Ramaḍān] when one or multiple singers (depending on 
the skill and repertoire of available performers) would be employed to regale 
audiences through the long nights over the length of the month [Lord 2000: 15-
18; Murko 1951: 355-56]. 

Fere was also a political side to Bosnian coffeehouses that is not often 
discussed. In most areas of Bosnia, coffeehouse owners belonged to their own 
unique guild [esnaf]. Sometime during the end of seventeenth or the beginning of 
eighteenth century, the Ottoman state tried to extend fiscal control over coffee 
distribution by forcing vendors to bring their beans to a common location for 
grinding (actually crushing). Fe grinding was called tahmis after an Arabic verb 
meaning to quintuple or divide in five [Arab. Takhamus], due to the fact that one 
fifth of the cost of grinding was collected by the state. Fe coffeehouse owners 
would take their beans to a designated location, a tahmishane [lit. grinding house], 
where the coffee would be poured into a large stone mortar [dibek, lit. pillar, 
column; beam] and pulverized into a fine grind with a large iron pestle. Fis 
practice was mostly imposed on guild-members in larger cities, while in rural 
areas grinding was commonly done as Hangi describes, in large wooden pestles 
made from hollowed-out trees. Dictates of the Sublime Porte made it illegal for 
coffeehouses to have their own mortars, but rampant violations of this law, which 
disadvantaged honest dealers, led to the monopoly being abandoned in 1868 
[Kreševljaković 1935: 163]. 

Bosniak Habits and the Orientalist Gaze 

For South Slavic academics in the Habsburg Empire, connecting with their 
linguistic brethren in the faltering Ottoman Empire was viewed as a necessary 
early step for cultural unification and political autonomy. In 1878, when the 
Habsburgs occupied a wide swathe of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the 
Ottomans, academic and political discourse out of Croatia and Serbia aimed to 
establish clear connections between Serbs and Croats across imperial divisions 
and to ensure Bosniak Muslims that Serbian, Croatian and Yugoslav political 
visions held conceptual space for them as well. In Croatian intellectual circles, 



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much of this discourse was informed by an honest drive to find ethnic unity across 
religious and political boundaries. Fese Croats had a sincere passion to 
understand how the culture of the Slavs long-conquered by the Ottomans and cut 
off from their cultural and linguistic kin by the Military Frontier had developed 
along its unique historical path. Fis drive, however, also included, or was later 
motivated by others (such as other academics, politicians, or statesmen) towards 
a political vision to enfold various sections of the Bosniak population into the 
Croatian ethnonym. 

Hangi’s politics are of particular note in this context. While working with 
Matica hrvatska, his views reveal a Croatian nationalism aimed at incorporating 
Bosniaks into a larger Croatian national program. Speaking as “a Croat who loves 
Croatia above all” [n.d.a: 197], he talked about Bosnian Muslims as “the brothers 
that we lost and would happily return under the wing of Croatia” [196]. In his 
letters [196] and in the forward to his book’s second edition [1906: 5], he remarks 
that his main aim in the work was to depict Bosniaks in sympathetic tones to 
assuage the perhaps unflattering views that Croatian gentlemen might have about 
their Muslim brethren and ease rapprochement. Given these political leanings, 
Hangi’s view on Bosniaks often carried overtones of Orientalist simplification, 
albeit regularly positive ones. In the forward to the first edition of his book, he 
describes [5] how his sojourns in various Bosnian cities had impressed upon him 
how “our Muslims are everywhere the same; of the same honesty and character.”  

Edin Hajdarpasic [2015: 15-17] has considered this outlook toward Bosnia 
and Bosniaks as undecidable, potential co-nationals, using a phrasal interpretive 
device, “the (br)other.” He uses this evocative formation to manifest then 
contemporary Serbian and Croatian nationalist understandings of Bosniaks as a 
nascent population—simultaneously insufficiently patriotic but also necessary for 
the national future—impregnated with the potential to choose to be, be used as, 
or be rejected as brother and/or other. As in Hangi’s passage above, in folklore 
and folklife writings about Bosniaks at the time, this outlook regularly manifested 
at a semantic level. Here, the rhetoric fluctuates between the type of common 
Orientalist othering that Edward Said clearly outlined in his opus [1979: 237-8]: 
“Fe Muslim does x, y, z…” and a more intimate “our Muslims/our Muslim 
brethren do x, y, z…” Fis language suggested national unity while also 
solidifying perceptions of ethnic difference within a perceived singular linguistic 
zone. Bosniaks were intrinsically fortified as simultaneously ‘us’ and ‘them,’ 
while fostering an internal hierarchy of those co-linguals who are more or less 
western or eastern, based on their habits and practices [Bakić-Hayden 1995: 922-
31; Živković 2011: 42-75]. 

Hangi’s passage on the coffeehouse, and the next piece by the collector 
Franjo Murgić, present clear examples of this othering discourse. Fe works 
regularly reduce Bosniaks to a simplistic caricature. It is worth noting, however, 
that this type of simplified description was not unique to depictions of the Bosniak 
population, but also manifested in many folklife accounts that treated Croat and 
Serb peasants too. In many ways, this was a descriptive trope that defined the style 
of the submissions at that early stage of ethnographic scholarship. Fere are 



 

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however, certain impressions that belong uniquely to Orientalist discourse. In 
Hangi’s passage, the Bosniaks are exceptionally suspicious of foreigners entering 
their coffeehouses, even though similar establishments in rural Croatia would 
likely produce identical results. Fey are infinitely passive, deeming all of life as 
fated. Fey have nerves of steel, smoke from childhood, and are impervious to the 
effects of caffeine and nicotine. We also encounter here a topic regularly visited 
in nineteenth-century Western scholarship when describing cultures of the 
“Orient:” the presumed freedom, slow living, and leisure of Muslim populations. 
Despite Islamic principles that discouraged aimless leisure [Hattox 1985: 120-
21], and a general dynamism inherent to any large group, much early-modern 
period writing on the Ottoman Empire and other regions farther afield focused on 
the presumed leisure of “the East” as a reductive stereotype [Alatas 1977; 
Fludernik 2014; Lane 1871 II: 31; Said 1979: 49, 178, 253]. Hangi’s coffeehouse 
attendee drinks at his leisure and is carried away by flights of fancy, staring at 
flowing water while his serfs do his work for him back home. In the midst of 
Hangi’s deep description of Bosniak coffee culture he cannot help but falling into 
Western European tropes aimed at raising the bar on the exoticism of the 
“Easterners” in his account. Poetically describing the ambiance of the coffeehouse 
and the ćeif in the air, he reifies the (br)other in descriptive examples.  

Fis ethnic othering did not go unnoticed though. Even at this early era of 
academic discourse in the region, Hangi’s simplification of complex regional 
manifestations of Bosniak culture brought criticism from more astute 
commentators. A sharp critique came from a fellow folklorist, Luka Grdić-
Bjelokosić, who produced a detailed treatise criticizing the inaccuracies and 
romantic tendencies in Hangi’s work [Kajmaković 1990: 9-11]. (24) And yet, the 
sincerity of Hangi’s account shone through his sometimes myopic scope. Fe 
book also stood as a rarity at that time for trying to convey such a wide description 
of life and culture among Muslim Bosnians, and many of his passages contained 
a wealth of information and folklife description. Because of these traits, the book 
became quite popular upon release and garnered praise from most circles [8-9]. 
In fact, the book was so popular that its final fate ended up sidetracking Hangi’s 
political leanings. His work saw publication in full at a time when the Habsburg 
government authority in Bosnia was attempting to thwart Croatian and Serbian 
expansionary goals on the intellectual plain by supporting research that focused 
on Bosniaks as a unique ethnic group [Hajdarpasic 2005: 176-86; Okey 2007]. 
Fey recognized the potential in Hangi’s work for their efforts and purchased most 
copies of his first edition to be disseminated to school libraries [Kajmaković 1990: 
8]. Fus, a work originally intended to support Muslim identification under the 
Croatian banner ultimately ended up supporting an independent Bosniak 
nationalism. 

Passage #2: Franjo Murgić – Fe Schedule of a Bosniak 

Fis passage is taken from an unpublished manuscript, Ethnographic and 
Folklore Material from Visoko [Murgić 1898c], which describes folklore and 



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folklife in the central Bosnian city of Visoko, situated half-way between the larger 
centers of Sarajevo and Zenica. Fe collector, Franjo Murgić, was a Catholic 
school teacher from Slavonia. In early 1898 he moved to Visoko to assume a 
position in a newly established school constructed by the Habsburg 
administration. Here he shared a rental with a fellow teacher, Stanko Ljubičić, a 
Serb from the Croatian town of Vrgin Most (also known as Gvozd) [Murgić 
1899]. Soon after his arrival, he petitioned =e Review’s editors for a collecting 
guide [1898a] and spent the remainder of 1898 collecting material for the journal 
from the town’s sizeable Muslim and Orthodox population. Under the guidance 
of the journal’s editors, Murgić collected the wide range of folklore and folklife 
data outlined in the guide and also spent considerable time collecting local history 
from informants. Fough he regularly complained about his overburdened class 
sizes and heavy workload, he made a point of inviting local Muslim elders into 
his home to conduct extended interviews with them on a range of topics [1898b]. 
He also attempted to collect material which the editors viewed as valuable, 
including photographs of local Muslim women. In one of his letters, he noted that 
they would be impossible to photograph alone due to issues of honor, but that they 
could be persuaded if in a group [1899]. Despite his earnest efforts, his manuscript 
remained quite thin and only a small number of short sections ever saw 
publication in the journal [see Jurić 2020].  

Fe following short passage presents a description of the daily habits of 
Bosniaks during the winter and summer. It is useful for conveying a general sense 
of the important role coffee drinking and coffeehouse attendance served in the life 
of Bosniak males, especially during winter months. Fe passage, however, is built 
on the same kind of generalizing tendency that Hangi’s work presented, reducing 
an entire ethno-religious group to a singular caricature. In line with the style of 
the journal, and like Hangi’s passage above, the text is rife with local Turkish-
loanwords inserted to convey some regional color to the account.  

If one were to come in the morning in winter into someone’s house [in 
Visoko], one would not find him in his chamber [odaja] but rather at a 
café. In the afternoon he is in the merchant district of town [čaršija] or at 
a café; if he’s not in one, then he’s in the other. At akšam [at sunset] you 
can always find him at home, after akšam [at dusk] he is again in a café. 
During Ramaḍān he comes to the café for two and a half hours at akšam 
while he performs [lit. bows] his teravija prayers [nightly prayers for 
Ramaḍān]. (25) Fen he remains there for five and a half hours, or else 
spends this time visiting others. Fen he goes home to wake his wife and 
children, so they can cook a meal while he smokes and sits and plays 
with his little children. (26) He will drink coffee and then, when the meal 
is ready, he will spend two hours eating (namely, three hours before 
sunrise [sabah]). Fen, after finishing his meal, he will again play, smoke 
and drink coffee for another hour. He remains awake for this time, still 
two hours before sabah [sunrise], but will neither eat nor smoke a thing. 
Fen, when they have called [okujisati] the sabah (when the muezzin 



 

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24 

calls [adherents] from the minaret to morning prayer), they go to pray the 
sabah; then he will go home and sleep until noon. When they call the 
noontime prayer, then his wife wakes him to go pray. When he’s prayed, 
then [he walks] along the merchant district: up, down, up, down, like that 
until before the sunset prayers. Fen he goes home to snack. When they 
eat at night during Ramaḍān, they call that iftariti. (27) In that same way, 
whoever seeks him during the summer, will not find him at home. In the 
morning they go to work between 5:30 and 6 o’clock and in the evening 
he comes home at akšam, after akšam, or sometimes somewhere around 
two hours before akšam.  

As in Hangi’s piece, Murgić’s brief account conveys the central role that 
coffee played in Bosniak social life. Murgić reveals the way that daily schedules 
were guided by milestones of prayer times and coffee consumption, particularly 
in winter months when seasonal work was largely suspended. Fe “typical 
Bosniak” outlined in this piece, freed from certain duties by winter weather, shifts 
to a nocturnal schedule, which is implied to be supported in some part by the 
stimulating benefits of coffee. What Murgić provides is, in effect, a foodways 
time-table for a Bosniak male whose daily schedule is punctuated by meals and 
coffee. Fere is, of course, as in Hangi’s piece, an element of exaggeration, 
stereotyping, and orientalizing—as Hangi’s Bosniaks grow up on coffee and 
cigarettes and while their days away in fantasy, so too does Murgić’s Bosniak 
father sleep through every day and live at the coffeehouse—and yet, the fact that 
the summer season receives short shrift in the account reveals that there was 
something exceptional about the daily plotting of coffee habits in the winter 
months that drew Murgić’s attention. 

Private Coffee Practice in the Western Balkans 

With Murgić’s passage we move away from the coffeehouse and into the 
private home. In private practice, both in the nineteenth century and in the present, 
coffee serves numerous roles: it is often given as a gift when visiting family or 
friends; it is a crucial item served during formal and informal gatherings, and it 
carries its own system of etiquette and practice: It is brewed in the specific manner 
outlined in Hangi’s piece, always using the same, particular implements of 
preparation [pribor or takum], traditionally by the women of a household, poured 
out to all guests by the brewer before she serves herself, and always served 
extremely hot; as the traditional Bosnian saying goes “coffee poured and a woman 
undressed cannot wait” [kahva nalivena i žena otkrivena ne mogu čekati]. Fe 
drink is generally served with something sweet on the side, as opposed to the 
public practice in cafés of accompanying the beverage with a glass of water. For 
accompaniment, coffee is often paired with baked goods [kolači] of some sort, 
which help to break up the bitterness of the drink when served black. In Bosniak 
homes, the drink is traditionally paired with lokum/ratluk [Turkish delight], 
baklava, or else with large, rectangular sugar cubes (about twice as long and half 



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as thin as a common sugar cube) that are nibbled intermittently through the 
drinking (see Hadžiosmanović 2007; Işın 2013). 

Historically, as European cafés began to adopt Italian espresso machines in 
the mid-twentieth century, the traditional way of drinking Turkish coffee (turska 
kahva, also called domaća [domestic/homemade] kahva, and very rarely, usually 
in a tongue-in-cheek manner, Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian coffee [bosanska 
kahva/srpska kafa/hrvatska kava]), became relegated to household practice 
outside of Bosnia. In western regions (particularly the north-west corner of 
Croatia), it also took on connotations and stigma of backwardness and village 
practice as opposed to the cosmopolitan drinking of European coffee with milk in 
cafés. Marko Živković [2011: 47, 53-4] has explored the wide-reaching 
metonymic regional distinctions connected to the dichotomy between Viennese 
and Turkish coffee which often stand for a wide matrix of perceived internal 
divisions. Despite this divisive side, the domestic practice of sharing coffee with 
neighbors, friends and family is still viewed in the region as the purest symbol of 
proper and healthy interpersonal relationship and a healthy community balance 
[Helms 2010: 24-25; Stefansson 2010: 67-69].  

Passage #3: Ivan Zovko – On the Origin of Coffee  

Unlike the first two contributors, our final school teacher and lay folklore 
collector, Ivan Zovko, did not come to Bosnia from Croatia to teach, but was 
rather born there. A native of Mostar, he worked as a teacher in a number of areas 
of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was the author of a score of articles and books 
focused on Croatian and Bosniak folklore and folklife in Bosnia and Herzegovina 
[Marjanović 2009]. In his many letters written to the editors at =e Review—in 
his characteristically sloping, extended, nearly-illegible hand—the collector 
related only a few points about his personal life. During the time of his 
correspondence, he moved from a teaching position in Konjic in Herzegovina to 
another trade school in Sarajevo, before being relocated to another school in 
Bihać. Although the majority of his correspondence relates only to edits, 
corrections and redactions to his manuscripts and articles, he regularly presented 
himself as a Croatian patriot and nationalist, often ending his letters with a 
humorously overwrought “Croatian greeting” to the editors. He talked at length 
about establishing a printing press in Mostar and publishing regimes for Croatian 
interest papers in Mostar and Sarajevo [Zovko 1897: 2] as well as plans to open a 
Croatian book store in Sarajevo to better spread the Croatian name in Bosnia 
[1898: 2-3]. While he provided a wealth of data on Bosniak cultural practice, his 
main focus was aimed at relating the folklore and folklife of Croatians in Bosnia. 
Fe following legend, however, represents one of the many gems of Bosniak 
folklore that he unearthed for submission to =e Review. (28) 

Fis legend [Zovko 1892: 226] is drawn from an unpublished section of 
Zovko’s manuscript that focuses on peasant perceptions about the origins of 
common foods. Given collection practices of the time, this text could be Zovko’s 
descriptive retelling of one or many accounts he heard, modelled to a first-person 



 

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26 

narrative format. However, the passage bears the mark of a verbatim account 
recorded from an interlocutor. Given comparative data from other collectors of 
the time, this is most likely the case, despite Zovko leaving no information about 
the legend teller or the context of collection. 

If someone, I don’t know who, were to tell me that coffee came to be at 
the same time as other things, by Allah!, I would not believe him. I 
would go so far as to swear that it hadn’t existed before. In truth, coffee 
appeared at that time when the prophet Muḥammad wandered the Earth. 
Somehow it simply appeared on its own when it was taken from the 
human mind, but again, it is not as though it’s difficult for Allah or his 
messenger to do wondrous things. Truly, in that time, coffee somehow 
came to be, when the prophet Muḥammad made the prohibition against 
the drinking of wine and rakija [fruit brandy]. At that time, once, when 
he was headed to mosque, he began to ponder which drink might best 
replace rakija and wine. According to his habit and as he was wont, he 
wished then to give alms to a pauper. But, when he dug into his pocket, 
he had only one, singular coin, for he had already given out all his other 
money. He gave this coin to one pauper who had just then sat below the 
mosque’s door. As soon as that coin dropped into his [the pauper’s] palm 
it immediately transformed into some kind of strange g[r]ain which until 
that time was unseen and unheard of. It suddenly occurred to the prophet 
Muḥammad that this was some kind of sign regarding the thought he had 
just moments ago been thinking. When he got home, he planted that 
grain, for he had taken it from that pauper and prayed to Allah that a coin 
appear in his hand so that he might give it to the pauper in place of that 
grain. (29) Allah immediately did this for his messenger, and that grain, 
which he had planted, after only one, single night, sprouted, grew tall, 
flowered and bore fruit. Fen saintly Muḥammad taught everyone how to 
handle coffee and the entire world began to use coffee which only grows 
in holy places in Mecca. Fat’s why the plant won’t take elsewhere. 

Here we find the origins of coffee connected to the actions of the prophet 
Muḥammad at a time when he has decreed alcoholic beverages as illicit. Fere are 
some interesting revelations regarding perceptions of cultural geography in the 
piece, e.g., the Balkan spirit rakija [fruit brandy] is projected back to ancient 
Mecca, where it did not exist. Meanwhile, the Bosnian fabulator who provided 
the tale reveals a clear knowledge of coffee as an Arabic import, albeit here from 
Mecca rather than from Yemen. Fe point of this legend, though, is not only to 
offer an explanation of origin for coffee, but to typify the drink as a sacred item in 
opposition to profane and prohibited alcoholic beverages. To accomplish this, 
sacred contexts are heaped upon coffee’s spontaneous generation; the plant is 
supernaturally bequeathed to the Prophet from Allah while the former is 
pondering the prospects of a righteous drink, heading to mosque, and 
impoverishing himself to the point of destitution with almsgiving. Coffee’s 



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sacrality, as a traditional topic of vernacular discourse, was specifically linked to 
the turbulent history of debates regarding the drink’s status as a permissible food 
item among Islamic religious authorities. Fis history of the drink’s reception in 
the Ottoman Empire provides the clues that explain the storyteller’s stress on 
coffee’s holy character.  

Is Coffee Ḥalāl? 

From its earliest introduction to Arabic lands, coffee faced severe suspicion 
and backlash from conservative civil and religious authorities. Fe first recorded 
opposition to the drink arose in Mecca in 1511 when the martinet pasha of the 
Mamluks and civic overseer of marketplaces [muḥtasib] of Mecca, Khā’ir Beg al-
Mi‘mār held a sort of “trial against coffee” among the city’s ‘ulamā [Muslim 
scholars consulted to interpret theology and sacred law] to convince them of the 
drink’s dangers. With a consensus reached (under political pressure) the religious 
judges [qāḍīs] of Mecca sided with Khā’ir Beg, who proclaimed coffee illicit and 
had his deputies begin closing down coffeehouses, beating drinkers and sellers 
and burning any beans they found. Fis state of affairs obtained until an official 
decree arrived from the Sultan of Cairo, supporting disapproval of social 
gatherings to drink coffee, but not prohibiting the drink. Fis effectively ended 
Khā’ir Beg’s persecutions [Hattox 1985: 30-37; Weinberg and Bealer 2001: 11-
12].  

Such reactions to coffee drinking in the Ottoman Empire were to become a 
common occurrence over the next two hundred years. Fere were riots over 
coffeehouses in Cairo in 1521 and 1532 [Tucker 2011: 52]. In 1534-5 (A.H. 941) 
the city degenerated into chaos after local preachers incited mobs to attack the 
establishments and counter-protestors met them in the streets [Hattox 1985: 38-
40]. In 1543, the first merchant boat bringing coffee from Yemen to Turkey was 
sunk, because of a fetva (Arab. fatwa, a legal opinion produced by a mufti) issued 
by shaykh al-islām Abū Su‘ud [Krstić 1974: 72]. 

Polemics about whether coffee should be considered ḥalāl [permissible] or 
ḥarām [forbidden] offered lively discussion and bitter argument amongst the 
‘ulamā. As a novel item neither known in the time of Muḥammad and the first 
caliphs, nor mentioned in the Qur’ān, coffee was considered bid‘ah [innovation] 
and thus warranted suspicion and careful weighing of its perceived merits and 
dangers. Such innovations generally received immediate disapproval and 
rejection from conservative scholars and religious figures who viewed them in 
terms akin to heresy. More progressive voices, however, would rely on a stronger 
principle in Islam, the concept of original permissibility [al-ibāḥa al-aṣlīya], a 
firm binary tenet of mutual exclusivity that decrees that all that is not illicit is 
perforce licit.  

Fe naming of coffee did not help the beverage’s case. Fe term qahwah was 
used in Arabic before the introduction of coffee as an epithet for wine. Fe name 
may have been applied by analogy, since the root q-h-w/y denotes aversion—
coffee putting one off of sleep as wine was believed to put one off of food— or by 



 

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homophony, as a drink from the Ethiopian region of Kaffa [Hattox 1985: 18-19; 
Weinberg and Bealer 2001: 24-5]. No matter the source of the initial ascription, 
it could not aid the novel coffee to be associated with a substance of dissipation 
so clearly prohibited in the Qur’ān [II.219, IV.43, V.90-91]. Besides some ardent 
critics, most were willing to admit that coffee did not intoxicate in the same 
manner as alcohol. It did, however, have noticeable psychoactive effects on the 
imbiber, and as such was suspect as impermissible. Many early critics also 
compared coffee to wine because it was drunk in groups and, purportedly, 
regularly passed amongst drinkers “from hand to hand” like wine [Elezović 1938: 
625; Hattox 1985: 117-20]. 

A further objection against the inherent dangers of the drink was raised in 
the sixteenth century by Şeyhülislâm Abū al-Su‘ūd Efendi (1490-1574) who 
argued that coffee beans were roasted to beyond the point of carbonization and 
thus were hazardous to the drinker [Hattox 1985: 114; Lewis 1963: 133; Peçevi 
1999 I: 350; White 1845 I: 280]. Fese assertions were based upon the conception 
of jurists that included charcoal in a list of food items which are ḥarām on grounds 
of “manifest harm” [ḍarar]. Although contested even in al-Su‘ūd’s time, this 
argument continued to surface in numerous fetvas and treatises. 

In his seminal work on coffee in the medieval Near East [1985], Ralph S. 
Hattox has competently argued that most of these religious arguments were, in 
fact, justifications used to add weight to an ire raised by the more practical civic 
danger implicit in coffee drinking. Fe problem was less with the drink itself, than 
with the social structure that arose around it and that threatened the central role of 
the mosque in Islamic social life. Coffeehouses were often sites of political 
discussion, unrest and intrigue, and regularly the point of origin for revolts in this 
time. Furthermore, many coffeehouses modelled too closely the taverns that had 
come before them, becoming the locus of illicit behaviors such as gambling, 
prostitution, homosexual interactions, drug use and other unsavory vices (see 
Image 4). Fere were, however, contrary voices who argued against the 
connection between coffee and wine. Fey supported coffee as a stimulant that 
could be used for diligence in work, study and prayer or outlined its medical 
benefits as a digestive aid, appetite suppressant, promoter of haleness, and cure 
for sanguinary ailments [Hattox 1985: 61-67; Krstić 1974: 92]. Yet even these 
voices could not condone the behaviors exhibited in the more disreputable 
establishments. (30) Indeed, the sixteenth century became a time of almost 
constant production of fetvas for or against coffee as the ‘ulamā tried to come to 
a consensus on how best to deal with the beverage. (31) 



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Image 4. A seventeenth-century Ottoman miniature depicting a coffeehouse. In 
the top right the kahveci is at his stove, at bottom-center men are playing what 

appears to be backgammon. Attendees drink coffee and smoke chibouks. 
[Museum with No Frontiers 2020] 



 

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30 

Fe polemic also became an official matter of the Porte on regular occasions. 
A number of Sultans, under pressure from religious leaders, took measures to 
prohibit and curtail coffee culture in an effort to curb revolt and diminish the 
occurrence of the many fires that plagued Istanbul and regularly stemmed from 
the smoking in coffeehouses. Around 1580, Sultan Murad III issued a number of 
interdictions and closed coffeehouses, ostensibly in response to fetvas that had 
been issued, but likely over concern of seditious activity and unflattering 
discussions in those locales about his brutal accession to the Sultanate [Lewis 
1963: 133; Weinberg and Bealer 2001: 15]; fermans [official mandates/decrees] 
were issued a number of times during the reigns of Ahmed I (1603-17) and again 
in the time of Mehmed IV (1648-87) [Elezović 1938: 628]. Fese prohibitions 
reach their apogee, though, in the reign of Sultan Murad IV (1623-40).  

Murad came to power at a time of disorder and anarchy in the empire. Fe 
previous sultans had allowed Janissary power to become unchecked and the 
empire was embroiled in an unpopular war against the Safavids. By this time, 
coffeehouses were fully entrenched as the meeting grounds of mutinous soldiers. 
Known for his iron-fisted rule, the splenetic Murad was not eager to suffer the fate 
of his older brother Osman II (r. 1618-22) whose regicide had been plotted in a 
popular janissary café [White 1845 I: 283-4]. After a coffeehouse fire in 1633 
grew out of control and consumed one fifth of Istanbul, he used the opportunity 
as pretext to issue a ferman outlawing the drinking of coffee and smoking of 
tobacco and opium. All coffeehouses and taverns were ordered closed or razed 
and none were permitted to be built. Fose who continued to sell these items or 
engage in their use were subject to harsh punishments including the death penalty. 
Popular legend and historiography from this time are rife with stories of 
coffeehouse owners being tied in bags and thrown into the Bosphorus [Weinberg 
and Bealer 2001: 15], cafés in Edirne being shuttered and all of their owners 
hanged, and of Murad himself patrolling the streets at night in disguise, sniffing 
the air for tobacco and executing anyone he came upon walking the streets without 
a lantern.  

Fese cruel prohibitions had a long aftermath, but they too soon passed. By 
the last quarter of the same century the coffeehouses were reopened and thriving. 
Finding their citizenry to be inveterate coffee drinkers and smokers willing to face 
the gallows for one final sip or puff, efforts at interdiction were finally abandoned. 
Fe last bans on coffee and tobacco were removed in 1688 [Fotić 2011: 93] and 
tobacco was finally declared licit by Chief Mufti Mehmed Baha’i Efendi, who had 
himself been dismissed and exiled in 1634 due to his own heavy smoking [Lewis 
1963: 136]. As Hattox has suggested, original permissibility [al-ibāḥa al-aṣlīya] 
inevitably overcame conservative responses to innovation [bid‘ah] [1985: 129].  

Fe Verdict on Coffee in Bosnia 

Fe edicts of the Porte seem not to have reached as far as Bosnia in any 
meaningful way. In 1658, while Murad IV’s ferman still held in Istanbul, the 
French traveler A. Poullet mentioned coffee being drunk in Bosnia as he traveled 



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through the Balkans on his eight-year eastern journey [Jelavić 1908: 66]. It is 
unclear if the ferman was ever carried to the eyalet, or if a return to equilibrium 
had simply been expedited in Rumelia. Fat does not mean that political edicts on 
coffee were unknown in the region; rather, they were familiar, but often localized. 
Numerous political uprisings in Bosnia also had their rabbles roused in local 
coffeehouses: the riots that reigned from 1747-56; the 1820 resistance put down 
by Ali Dželaludin Paša; the protests that arose after the abolition of the Janissaries 
in 1826; the 1831 revolt of the “Dragon from Bosnia,” Captain Husein-beg 
Gradaščević; and the 1832 uprising of Hasan bajraktar Zubović all had their 
beginnings in coffeehouses. In the latter case, and likely for many others, 
Zubović’s café was razed on 8 June 1832 after his movement had been suppressed 
[Kreševljaković 1935: 162]. 

Fe learned deliberations on the use of coffee were also well known in the 
region. Sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century, while Bosnians were 
enjoying a period of peace, the Bosnian mufti of Prusac, Muṣṭafā ibn Muḥammad 
al-Aqḥiṣārī (died 1755/6, A.H. 1169), wrote a treatise on the use of coffee and 
tobacco in his native land [Krstić 1974]. He was well informed of the various 
debates surrounding these items in the empire and decided to weigh in on the 
conversation. A proponent of the drink, he strongly opposed the fetvas levelled 
against coffee, celebrating it on numerous grounds—for inducing heartiness and 
a positive mood, affecting one’s productivity in a positive manner [92], causing 
good digestion, warming the body, and exercising holy thoughts and an 
inclination towards pious obedience, among many other beneficial aspects [94]. 
He related his own affirmative experiences with coffee which helped him actively 
read books and kept him awake at night, allowing him to avoid lethargy and sleep 
for a longer, more productive day [93]. He could not say the same for tobacco, 
however, spending pages adumbrating sixteen formal proofs of the harmful effects 
to the body and soul caused by smoking [96-99]. (32) He included tobacco in the 
list of detestable things outlawed for consumption under Muslim sharīʿa [96], 
stressing that it is neither food nor medicine, has neither positive spiritual nor 
profane use and is only a filthy entertainment that harms the body. 

 However, by the nineteenth century, these debates had lost their urgency 
and both drinking coffee and smoking tobacco had become firmly established 
practices among all religious groups in the region. Fis popularity did not mean, 
however, that the stigma of the coffeehouse had been completely whitewashed, 
nor that the majority of religious officials viewed the practices as particularly 
virtuous or reputable. Fough most of the ‘ulamā in Bosnia had long accepted 
coffee as permissible, its status as an innovation remained. Zovko’s legend on the 
origin of coffee likely stems from vernacular attempts to justify the beverage by 
not only projecting back in time and having the bean exist in the time of the 
Prophet, but in fact by establishing him as the magical source for the bean’s 
existence. (33)  



 

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Conclusion: Conveying the Ćeif along with the Coffee 

It is my hope that the three passages presented here, previously unpublished 
or untranslated in English, will contribute to an understanding of the role of coffee 
in nineteenth-century Bosnian Muslim culture. I have endeavored to present them 
in a manner that places them in a historical and cultural framework that 
contextualizes their importance and lays bare the academic focus that undergirds 
the epistemic view that influenced their collection. Fe three Croatian school 
teachers whose work is presented here entered the Bosnian and Herzegovinian 
communities in which they worked to gather folklore data bookmarked for a 
Croatian readership. Fey aimed to exhibit unique and curious aspects of Bosniak 
culture at a time when rapid political and economic change was poised to alter or 
overwhelm those practices. Read together, these works act as a highly effective 
overview of the socially-embedded nature of coffee culture among Bosnian 
Muslims and present an early example of folklife and foodways research 
[Anderson 1971; Hinson and Ferris 2009; Long 2004; 2009; Yoder 1972]. Fey 
offer a window into the shared practices and symbolic patterns of meaning that 
surrounded Muslim coffee culture in nineteenth-century Bosnia and Herzegovina. 
Far from simplistic depictions of how to cook and drink the beverage, Antun 
Hangi, Franjo Murgić, and Ivan Zovko provided a vantage point onto the role 
coffee serves as an “everyday practice… that inject[ed] meaning into life’s 
unyieldy dailiness… [and] len[t] comfort in [its] familiarity and sharedness” 
[Hinson and Ferris 2009: 8]. Frough their work, contemporary and current 
readers obtain(ed) a sense of being in a local coffeehouse and of watching the 
processes of a cultural structure play out. In their short passages, these lay scholars 
conveyed a sense of the temporality of coffee and its embeddedness in daily and 
yearly schedules, the politics of interaction that arose in sites of meaning 
structured around the habit of drinking, the aesthetics and ambiance that 
surrounded coffeehouses and other sites of coffee use, and even how the 
supernatural, the divine and the holy became woven into the tapestry of coffee 
lore in order to legitimize the practice. Given these analytical achievements, it is 
a pity that in such seemingly mundane writing as that devoted to the drinking of 
coffee and coffeehouse culture, one perceives, through the interstices of their 
sentences, telling hints of Croatian political views about Bosnian Muslims and 
wider Orientalist tendencies that were an academic currency of the time.  

Like many other Bosniak practices recorded in the nineteenth century by 
both Croat and Serb scholars, the aim of relating coffee culture in Bosnia and 
Herzegovina was to simultaneously reveal the exotic and foreign habits of 
Croatia’s south-easterly neighbors, while also stressing those similarities that 
bound the Slavic populations together across political divides. For Croatian 
readers of the time, newly ceded territories, sometimes less than 100 kilometers 
away from their own homes, could beguile in the same way that Western 
European audiences hungrily collected fantastic tales from the One =ousand and 
One Nights and Eastern travelogues. In fact, this appeal was all the richer for the 
underlying similarities of their exotic, and yet familiar, (br)others.  



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Frough the writings of Murgić, Hangi and Zovko we are provided some 
unique vantages on nineteenth-century Bosniak coffee culture, but also on the 
ways that these practices were conveyed to a Croatian audience. Fey strove to 
present the unique nature of Bosniak culture, while packaging those curiosities in 
an epistemic frame entitled “what has happened to our brethren.” In presenting an 
embedded, folklife account of coffee foodways, these Croatian scholars 
successfully conveyed the ćeif that comes along with coffee but, beguiled by the 
exotic notes they perceived in that added mood, they could not help but simplify, 
other and Orientalize the subjects of their research. By translating these works we 
can not only gain an intimate view inside both a nineteenth-century Bosniak home 
and coffeehouse (and reveal an interesting origin legend for the beverage), but 
also see the ways that Croatian folklore and folklife collectors hoped to bring a 
sense of the Bosniak’s “exotic” ways home to a Croatian readership. 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

I am indebted to the helpful comments on this piece provided by Drs. John 
Colarusso and Naomi McPherson, my two anonymous reviewers, and the 
journal’s generous editor, as well as the insight and aid of Marina Jurić. I also owe 
a word of thanks to Blanka van Raalte and her father Bećir Behrem for helping 
me find the right translation of a pernicious word. Finally, my gratitude is also 
owed to the Department of Ethnology at HAZU for providing access to their 
archive. Part of this research was supported by the Social Sciences and 
Humanities Research Council of Canada and McMaster University. 

NOTES 

1 Because of its intimate connection to the drink in the region, some 
reflection on tobacco use will also be discussed. 

2 Mikhail makes particular note of Lane’s passage [1871 I: 173-75], which 
is indeed lacking in elaboration and depth. Burton’s accounts are also quite thin 
[1874 I: 197, 209-10, 248; II: 99, 206; III: 71, 123, 147]. Beyond Hangi’s 
description presented here, Charles White also offered a notable exception with 
his highly informative passages on the coffee [1845 I: 277-86; II: 132-3] and 
tobacco [1845 II: 125-52] culture of Istanbul. 

3 Historically variously spelled and pronounced ćeif, ćejif, ćejf, ćef, ćeiv, 
kejf, etc. in the BCMS languages see Škaljić [2014: 176-77]. Fis concept has 
salience throughout the Balkans and Middle East [e.g. Alb. qejf; Bulg. kef; Gk. 
kéfi; Pers. keyf] with several unique idiomatic variations in each language. In 
Turkish, this word also carries a wide range of phrasal variety based on a number 
of verbal combinations, for example: keyif sürmek – to live the good life; keyif 
bilmek – to do as one pleases, etc. For a discussion of coffee practice and the 
concept of ćeif in a modern Bosnian-American immigrant context, see Croegaert 
[2011]. 



 

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34 

4 Here Hangi plays on a common folk expression “I/pa mirna Bosna” 
[and/then peaceful Bosnia], meaning “and then everyone is happy/in agreement,” 
and used in contexts akin to the English idiom “and Bob’s your uncle.” 

5 It is not clear if the earliest recorded coffee preparations were kisher, the 
green, tea-like beverage brewed from the husks and skins of the coffee bean, 
bounya, the thick early predecessor of Turkish coffee made from raw boiled beans, 
or both. On this early preparation history, see Weinberg and Bealer [2001: 22-3]. 

6 Fe Ottoman Yemeni port of Mocha and the Dutch Indonesian port of 
Java became synonymous bywords for coffee and its trade. 

7 Fe Ottoman historians Kâtip Çelebi [1957: 59] and İbrahim Peçevi 
[1999 I: 351] give conflicting dates. For an English translation of Peçevi’s account 
of Istanbul tobacco and coffee culture, see Lewis [1963: 132-36]. 

8 Fe Turkish çubuk [lit. shoot/sapling/staff; BCMS čibuk] is most 
commonly between one and five ells [Turk. arşın; BCMS (h)aršin] in length and 
composed of three parts: a ceramic bowl [Turk. lüle, lit. ceramic hearth; BCMS 
lula], a hollowed wooden (or reed) stem [Tur. kamış; BCMS kamiš], and a 
colorful mouthpiece most commonly made from carved amber or other soft 
minerals. In the Western Balkans, only the term lula has survived into the present 
day as the BCMS word for a smoking pipe. Smokers in the region also employed 
hookahs [BCMS nargile], but much more rarely. Cigarettes and cigars did not 
take a firm hold in the region until the twentieth century.  

9 Fe Turkish fincan [cup; BCMS findžan/fildžan] is a small (usually 
holding about an ounce and a half of liquid), porcelain, or clay, handle-less coffee 
cup. It was the most common receptacle for drinking coffee in the Ottoman 
Empire. Finer coffee sets for homes might be set into a zarf [BCMS zarf/zalf/zaf; 
from Arab. ẓarf, lit. container, envelope], a metal, handled or handle-less holder, 
made of elaborate metal filigree or simple hammered tin or brass, and reminiscent 
of an egg-cup, into which the fincan was nested (see an illustration in Lane [1871 
I: 174]). Fese were, however, rarely on offer in coffeehouses. Fotić [2011: 95] 
notes that archaeologists have unearthed findžans imported from as far afield as 
Germany and China at sites in Belgrade. Fe word itself has a long heritage: 
Turkish fincan ß Arabic finjān ß Persian pengân ( ناگنپ ) ß Greek pínax (πίναξ), 
the latter two denoting a shallow plate or dish. 

10 For a clear, English-language discussion of the views of the four major 
Sunni schools of religious jurisprudence on alcohol, see Hattox [1985: 50-57]. 

11 Compare this date, and those listed below with the opening of the first 
coffeehouses in major Western European centers: Venice in 1640, Oxford 1650; 
London 1652, Marseille 1654, Fe Hague 1664, Paris 1672, Vienna 1685, or 
Frankfurt 1689 [Cowan 2005: 90; Elezović 1938: 633; Kreševljaković 1935: 161; 
Weinberg and Bealer 2001: 18, 64, 71, 77, 154]. 

12 Until the nineteenth century, the BCMS languages employed the older 
conception that tobacco is drunk rather than smoked or blown [Fotić 2011: 96]. 
To this day the Turkish language still retains this usage (e.g., Sigara içmek, “to 
drink a cigarette”). 



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13 Fe Ottoman Millet system was an administrative approach to empire 
which, though shifting through various formations over time, provided a 
significant level of juridical and administrative autonomy to various confessional 
communities. It was an early example of religious pluralism built out of Islamic 
principles regarding dhimmi populations that came to influence wider conceptions 
of societal structure. See Braude [1982].  

14 In these passages, I consistently translate the term 
kahvana/kafana/kavana as coffeehouse. Fe term kahva/kafa/kava I have glossed 
as café, as the term is used in English and also means both coffeehouse and coffee 
in the original French. 

15 Croats celebrate St. George’s day [Croat. Jurjevdan, Serb. Đurđevdan] 
on April 23rd according to the Gregorian calendar, while the majority of Bosniaks, 
who interestingly retained this celebration through their conversion to Islam, 
observe the holiday as the Serbs do according to the Julian calendar on May 6th. 
Hangi could be referring to either, though the time of year is the same. 

16 From Tur. Bayram - festival, celebration, holiday. Fis can refer to both 
Hadžijski Bajram/Kurban Bajram (Eid al-Adha), Fe Festival of the Sacrifice, 
celebrated 77 days after Ramaḍān and lasting for four days, or to Ramazanski 
Bajram (Eid al-Fitr), Fe Festival of Breaking the Fast, celebrated immediately 
after Ramaḍān and lasting for three days. Fe former is considered the greater 
holiday and so likely intended here. 

17 Fe BCMS languages normally use the verb kuhati/kuvati [to boil, to 
cook]. Hangi points out that it was common among Bosniaks of the time to use 
the term peći [to bake]. 

18 Monetary denomination of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. One one-
hundredth of a Krone and known as a Filler in Hungary. 

19 Fis is a reference to the oft stereotyped conception of fate and the 
predestined nature of life in Muslim worldview which regularly figure in Western 
scientific writing [Grosfoguel 2010: 32; ibn Warraq 1995: 123-27, 157; Lane 1871 
I: 84, 357-58; II: 200; Qur’ān III.139, IX.51, XIII.30, XIV.4, XXXII.32, XLV.26, 
LIV.49, LVII.22, LXXXVII.2]. 

20 Fese terms represent both a time of day and the prayer that occurs at 
that time: Sabah namaz (Tur. sabah namazı; Arab. ṣalāt al-fajr), the morning 
prayer time between dawn and sunrise, akšam namaz, (Tur. akşam namazı, Arab. 
ṣalāt al-maghrib) between sunset and dusk, and jacija namaz (Tur. yatsı namazı; 
Arab. ṣalāt al-‘ishā’) the fifth and final prayer of the day. 

21 Fe regional name for tobacco too derives from the Arabic [dukhān] by 
way of Turkish [duhan] into the local form duhan, with an eastern dialect variant 
of duvan (a division later cemented as the respective standard forms for the 
Croatian and Serbian languages). A Turkish-derived variant form tutun [Turk. 
tütün] and an Austrian-derived tabak are also attested. 

22 BCMS and Turk. ibrik, loaned from Arab. ’ibrīq. BCMS džezva from 
Turk. cezve, Arab. jadhwah. For an overview of coffee preparation in the core 
Islamic world see Hattox [1985: 82-87]. 



 

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36 

23 From Tur. karagöz, lit. Black-eye. Fis is the name of one of two main 
characters in a popular Turkish shadow-puppet play, Karagöz and Hacivat [İvaz 
the Pilgrim]. It was applied to the same show when performed in Bosnia, but the 
term became extended to also include marionettes, jesters and magicians who 
performed on similar occasions. 

24 Fis critique served almost as a refined and locally internalized, although 
milder, replay of the Fortis and Lovrić debate over rights to representation. See 
Wolff [2001: 228-75]. 

25 BCMS teravija, Tur. teravi, Arab. (pl.) tarāvīḥ. Special nightly prayers 
for Ramaḍān which are conducted after the conclusion of the fifth and final prayer 
of the day jacija namaz. 

26 Fe collector here oddly uses the word “zidati” [to build, to erect walls]. 
Fis word simply does not fit the context. It is unclear what Murgić meant; perhaps 
this typical Bosniak father is playing some sort of building game with the 
youngest children, but the phrasing suggests infants or toddlers and is too general 
for such a specific act. It is tempting to read the word as “zibati” [to rock, to lull], 
but there is much working against this reading: Fe word is clearly written twice 
(i.e., not lapsus calami), zibati is a widely distributed, old Slavic verb that is 
generally familiar to people in most regions (i.e. it is unlikely that Murgić is trying 
to present an unfamiliar, regional word and getting it wrong), and zibati takes the 
accusative, not the instrumental as in the example. I have simply defaulted to a 
translation that makes sense in context. 

27 Fis is a local verb form for the Arabic word ’ifṭār, the first meal to break 
the Ramaḍān fast. 

28 I classify this oral narrative from Zovko’s collection as a legend due to 
its “believable” content being situated in a historical past and its plot accounting 
for the genesis of a transient aspect of life, as opposed to the ancient before-time 
of myths that often explain broader and lasting phenomena [Bascom 1965; 
Gatling 2020; Jurić 2019: 46; Tangherlini 1990]. 

29 Fis section of the MS is difficult to discern. Fe word written seems to 
be “alika,” but I cannot find any such word in any dictionaries. I have used the 
dative form of the name Allah here, because it suits the context best, but I am not 
certain that this was the intended word. 

30 For some of the more important names associated with fetvas argued for 
and against coffee see Kreševljaković [1935: 161]; Krstić [1974: 73, 93, 102]; 
Lewis [1963: 135-6]; White [1845 I: 280]. 

31 Fe case for tobacco was even worse. Due to its highly addictive nature, 
its filthy smoke, and the number of fires that occurred after its use became 
commonplace, tobacco was the regular victim of interdiction from both Muslim 
and Christian communities [Fotić 2011: 91, 93, 94]. 

32 Zovko’s legend is drawn from a section of his manuscript that focuses 
on the origins of foods. It comes directly before a description of tobacco which 
reveals the collector to have shared al-Aqḥiṣārī’s negative view of the plant 
[Zovko 1892: 227]. 



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33 Such legends connecting coffee and the prophet Muḥammad seem to be 
common in the Middle East. Cf. Pendergrast [2010: 5]; Topik [2009: 89]; 
Weinberg and Bealer [2001: 9-10, 25]. 

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