Turkiye Coffee, Melancholy Coffee

Melancholy is sometimes described as a state in which the spark of life has been extinguished.  It's not completely dead, but it's a state where the flame of life is no longer burning brightly, but has turned into embers and is lying dormant beneath the ashes.  When I hear the word melancholy, I always think of the sigh of God.  The sigh of God in the midst of heavens hidden beneath the ashes and those of us who have lost the will to sift through the ashes to find the embers of heaven.

The sigh of God, a month after the tragedy, in a season when some of us are smiling and laughing about our daily lives and others are reveling in the excitement of the holidays.  Whenever I think of this sigh, I think of a coffee.    It's Turkiye coffee, also known as Turkish coffee.    It is the prototype of modern coffee.  Originating in Yemen, it blossomed under the Ottoman Empire and spread to Europe, where it fruited into the coffee culture we know today. 

Turkiye coffee is a simple brew of finely ground coffee, cardamom, and sugar in a coffee pot called a cezve or ibric.  The finely ground coffee is brewed and served directly into the cup without a filter, giving the drink a rich body, bitterness from the coffee grinds, spicy flavor from the cardamom, and sweetness from the sugar.

In Turkiye, coffee is said to be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love.  But rather than hell, the heavy body feels more like the comfort of a god holding down a creeping sorrow, the spicy aroma feels more like a god's staff that carefully bursts each drop of melancholy emotion than death, and the sweet flavor feels more like the compassion of a loving god who lifts a heart that has sunk to such an abyss.   

 

When I'm feeling down, I pull out my Ibric and make a cup of Turkiye coffee, which is dark roasted Guatemalan or Yemeni coffee, finely ground, with a dash of cardamom or ground cinnamon.  Nowadays, coffee brewed with ibric is often filtered to remove the coffee fat, but this doesn't give the coffee its true flavor.   

There's one thing you have to do when you're done with your cup of Turkiye coffee, and that's to read tasseograph which is a fortune telling through coffee grounds .   Of course, there is no one to be able to read the coffee marks, so we can't hear what the fortune teller is telling us, but maybe asking for the will of God to intervene in our daily lives every time we drink coffee is not the foolishness of the foolish, but the sincerity of those who want to always be open to the will of God.

 

Melancholy comes to us periodically in life.  When they do, it's a good idea to welcome them with a cup of Turkiye coffee.