Turkish Coffee Fortune Telling: History and Tradition
In Turkey nobody reads the cup to learn the future. You read it so you can stay sitting together for another half hour.
When visitors came to our house in Izmir, my grandmother did not ask a question. She got up and put the cezve on the flame. First you drank, then you talked, and at some point someone turned their cup over. Nobody ever announced it. It belonged to the coffee like the glass of water beside it.
In Turkey, reading the coffee grounds is simply called “fal”. The word comes from Arabic and means omen. If you take it only as fortune telling, you miss the main thing: fal is a custom among people who are fond of each other.
Here I tell where that custom comes from. I keep to what is documented, and I say where tradition takes over.
How coffee came to Istanbul
Coffee comes from the south. In the 15th century, Sufi communities in Yemen drank it to stay awake during their night devotions. From there it travelled north through Mecca, Cairo and Damascus. The Arabic word “qahwa” became “kahve” in Turkish, and Europeans later turned that into caffè, café and coffee.
Coffee has been at home in Istanbul since the middle of the 16th century, the age of Suleiman the Magnificent. The Ottoman chronicler İbrahim Peçevi reports that around the year 1554 two men from Syria, one from Aleppo and one from Damascus, opened the city’s first coffee houses in the Tahtakale quarter. Another, popular tradition names Özdemir Pasha, the governor of Yemen, as the man who brought coffee to the court. That cannot be proven with certainty.
What is certain is what Istanbul made of coffee. The beans were roasted, ground to dust and boiled with water in a cezve, unfiltered. The court soon had an office of its own for it, the kahvecibaşı, the chief coffee maker. The method has stayed the same to this day, and it is the reason there are grounds in the cup at all. How to brew such a coffee is covered in the guide on how to read Turkish coffee grounds.
The coffee houses
The coffee house, “kahvehane”, was something new: a place where men of different backgrounds sat together without praying and without trading. They played backgammon and chess, listened to the storyteller, the meddah, and watched the Karagöz shadow theatre. Contemporaries called the coffee houses schools of the learned.
The rulers found them unsettling. Where people talk, they also talk about the sultan. Coffee houses were banned several times, most strictly under Murad IV in the 1630s. No ban held. Coffee had long since settled into daily life, and from Istanbul it reached Venice, Vienna, Paris and London in the 17th century.
One point matters for the history of fal: the coffee house was a place for men. Women drank their coffee at home, in the hamam and on visits to one another. There people sat longer, and there was time for the cup afterwards.
How reading the cup became a custom
Nobody knows when someone first turned a cup over and read in it. No chronicler wrote it down. Tradition says the custom arose in the houses and women’s quarters of Istanbul soon after coffee became established there. That is plausible, and more than that cannot honestly be said.
What I know from my own family is this: fal was never learned like a trade with a certificate. It was watched. The daughter sat beside the mother, the granddaughter beside the grandmother. Every family had its own readings, which is why the zones of the cup and the meaning of some coffee cup reading symbols differ in detail from house to house.
In those circles fal had a job that has little to do with the future. Through the cup you could say what could not be said directly. A neighbour who knew that a marriage was going badly would see a mountain by the handle and a bright road behind it. The other woman understood. People were comforted, warned and encouraged that way, and nobody lost face.
That is also where the rules come from that still hold. You do not read your own cup. You read for someone sitting opposite you. And you say nothing that takes the other person’s courage away.
Sayings and the bride’s coffee
How Turkey stands towards fal is said in a single sentence:
Fala inanma, falsız da kalma. Do not believe in fal, but do not go without it either.
That is not a contradiction but an attitude. You take the cup seriously enough to listen, and not so seriously that you hand your life over to it. A second saying explains why the coffee itself carries such weight: “Bir fincan kahvenin kırk yıl hatırı vardır.” A cup of coffee is remembered for forty years. Whoever made you a coffee, you are bound to.
Nowhere is this clearer than when a hand is asked for in marriage. When the man’s family visits to ask for the woman’s hand, the bride to be makes the coffee and serves it to the guests. Her coffee, it is said, shows her skill. Into the groom’s cup, though, she puts salt in place of sugar, and some add pepper. If he drinks it without pulling a face, he has shown patience and good will. There are many explanations of where the custom comes from, and none is certain. It is alive to this day, and there is always laughter.
In those gatherings too, the cup is often turned over afterwards. What it says about ring and heart is in the piece on love in the coffee cup.
Turkish coffee culture on the UNESCO heritage list
In 2013 UNESCO inscribed Turkish coffee culture and tradition on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
What is protected is not a drink or a recipe. What is honoured is a way of living: the particular preparation in the cezve, serving it with water and something sweet, hospitality, the role of coffee at engagements and celebrations, conversation. Reading the grounds is also named in the description as part of this culture.
What I like about it is that fal does not stand to one side as a curiosity. It belongs to what coffee does: keeping people at one table.
Tasseography in other countries
Reading from cups has a learned name, tasseography. It contains the French “tasse”, which itself goes back to an Arabic word for bowl. The custom is older and more widespread than its name.
Tea leaves in Britain
When tea arrived in England in the 17th century and later became an everyday drink, people there began to read the leaves at the bottom of the cup. In the 19th century it was a favourite parlour pastime in Britain and Ireland. The rules are strikingly like the Turkish ones: the handle stands for the person asking, the rim for the near future.
Greece
Greek coffee is made the same way as Turkish coffee, and it is read the same way too. The cup is called “flitzani” there, a word that comes from the Turkish “fincan”. There as well, reading is above all the business of the women in a family.
The Arab world
In Arabic one speaks of “qirāʾat al-finjān”, the reading of the cup. In the Levant especially it belongs to a visit as the coffee does. Nizar Qabbani dedicated a famous poem to the woman who reads the cup, sung by Abdel Halim Hafez in 1976.
The Balkans and Armenia
Wherever the Ottoman Empire took coffee, the cup afterwards stayed as well. People still read in Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania, and in Armenian families. The symbols overlap widely: bird, fish, road and ring mean nearly the same everywhere.
What all these traditions share is that they read from what is left of a shared drink. That sets them apart from cards or stars. If you want to know how the creatures in the cup are read the Turkish way, see the piece on animals in the coffee grounds. And for the cards there is the tarot section.
Reading together at one table
For me the best part of fal was always the circle. Four or five women at a table, each with her cup. One reads, the others listen, throw in a word, disagree. What is in one cup often has to do with the cup beside it: the message that reaches one woman was sent by the other.
My grandmother read such gatherings like a single picture. She set the upturned cups in a row, read them in turn, and came back to the first one at the end. Whoever sat at the table learned not only something about herself but also how the others stood towards her.
I took that idea into the app. Alongside the reading for a single cup there is a round at the table: up to five cups are interpreted together in one reading. You make the coffee, drink, turn the cups and photograph each one. I write what is in each cup and what the cups have to do with one another.
The custom itself needs no app. It needs a table, a cezve and someone you are glad to push your cup towards.
Frequently asked questions
How old is Turkish coffee fortune telling?
Nobody knows exactly. According to tradition the custom arose in Istanbul after coffee became established there in the 16th century. Written evidence from the earliest period is missing. What is certain is that it has been part of everyday Turkish life for centuries.
Why does the groom get salty coffee?
When his family asks for her hand, the bride serves the coffee and salts the groom’s cup. If he drinks it without complaint, he shows patience and that he is serious. It is a light hearted test, not a verdict.
What exactly did UNESCO recognise in 2013?
Turkish coffee culture and tradition, as intangible cultural heritage of humanity. That means the preparation, the hospitality and the customs around coffee, among which the reading of the grounds is counted.
What does “Fala inanma, falsız da kalma” mean?
Literally: do not believe in fal, but do not stay without fal either. The saying describes how people in Turkey deal with it. You listen, take what helps, and decide for yourself.
Is coffee cup reading compatible with religion?
Many clerics reject fortune telling, in Islam as in Christianity, on the grounds that nobody can know what is hidden. In everyday Turkish life most people treat fal as conversation and pastime, not as a matter of faith. How you see it is your own decision. I understand the cup as interpretation and tradition, not as certainty.