It's time for the inaugural post for the year at WEP, but it's not any old year. WEP hits a major milestone in 2020, the tenth anniversary, wow! We've come a long way together, WEP and M-i-V. I can't believe it still, the way time flies. Thank you, Denise and WEP, for the badge and the fun and the learning.
I've been a bit ambitious with this prompt and spectacularly failed to trim my post to the required wordcount, so it's broken into two parts. The first appears for this challenge, the concluding part will go live on Sunday.
A Short History of Café. Terrace. Alfresco. Street Lighting. Pigments. And Nocturnes. (Part I)
So
I could have told you how I went to MoMA without checking, unpardonable! - and
found it closed for renovations. No shufti at a famous Night, no nibbles at
Terrace 5. But I won’t. Let’s begin at a different point, away from the nights,
away from shuftis, and most of all, away from me. Bored with staring at millions
of my own reflections in the sheesh mahals
of my mind. Let’s start with…this mug
beside me. With café. Which is the French word for coffee - absorbed into other languages to sometimes mean
the beverage and/or the place where it is drunk.
To do good work one must eat
well, be well housed, have one's fling from time to time, smoke one's pipe, and
drink one's coffee in peace.
~ Vincent Van Gogh
Coffee.
It’s another religion started and propagated by Arabs which took on a life of
its own, left them behind and happily traversed right round the world. Just
like the other one did. Every single country in the world consumes coffee, I
kid you not. And clearly coffee has done relatively better for itself than the
other faith propagated by Arabs, it’s
bagged more converts and has less phobia and misconceptions attached. But it
wasn’t always so. Coffee’s got enough bad press in the past, down to 17th
century ladies in London protesting it was an anti-Viagra kind of stuff, if you
know what I mean. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Things
kick off around 850 CE in Ethiopia. Because you know, all the good stories
start in Africa. A goatherd – yes, all good stories will also have an animal
flock tucked in somewhere – well, a herder called Kaldi notices his flock ‘dancing’
after they’ve munched on some berries. He takes the berries to a monk, who
disapproving, throws them into the fire, whereupon issues the most delicious
aroma. Other monks come to investigate, retrieve the roasted beans, grind them
up and brew the first mug of coffee. This is the first reference, in a book written
by a Lebanese professor of languages in Rome in 1671, of the origins of coffee. And
since it is almost nine centuries that Kaldi and party have proceeded to the
great café in the heavens, this is taken to be apocryphal, a legend. Except in
Ethiopia, where it’s treated with due seriousness as history and where both
Kaldi and The Dancing Goat are two popular names for cafés, with or without
terraces.
***
Talking
about terraces, I could have told you too, about their role in my childhood.
The first hailstorm I watched happened on one, a small internal terrace filling
up with hailstones one winter in front of my five year old, delighted-astonished
eyes. About sleeping on them on summer nights on charpoys
- all of Delhi did that in the 70s and 80s, don’t know if air pollution, crime
and sophisticated, modern lifestyles allow that anymore?
Terraces
go back much further than cafés. In architecture, they happened with the
building of the first shelters. There’s archaeological evidence from ancient settlements dotted
around the Levant, the oldest one dated to Palaeolithic times. Somewhere south
of Haifa in Israel is a village consisting of a cluster of 12/13 subcircular houses set on artificial
terraces, constructed around 10,000 BCE. Clearly, humans have always enjoyed
sitting around outdoors and sipping whatever beverages were in vogue, from the
earliest hours of civilisation. And alfresco dining is thought to have
originated with a quick filler of baked pastries and meats before people set
off on hunts in medieval times. Which then developed into more elaborate
picnics by the 18th century, as pleasure gardens, public parks and
outdoor spaces were developed. But eating outdoors for pleasure or as a leisure
activity was restricted strictly to the upper, more affluent classes. The
peasant farmer, the fisherman, the shepherd would naturally eat their slice of
pie out in the open, but that came with the job. In the early 20th
century, the automobile sparked off a sea change in lifestyles as more and more
people could travel further afield. Day trips became part of the repertoire of
family activities and work groups, picnicking boomed. The accessories available
also became more elaborate and so the hasty baked pre-hunt snack of medieval
times became a full-fledged formal meal taken outdoors. Okay, now back to coffee.
From
Ethiopia Arab traders brought it to Yemen, where it caught on with the Sufi
monks – they drank it to stay awake through the nights. The Arabs called it
qahwah – that which prevents sleep. Qahwah became popular with ordinary folks
too, especially during the month of Ramadan, when people stayed up deep into
the nights for prayer and entertainment. Mocha, an important trading port in
Yemen, became a focal point in the coffee route. By 1450-ish, the Ottoman Turks
had taken coffee to Istanbul where the first cafés, called qahwah-khane,
opened. From there it was a small step to Cairo and to Mecca. The qahwah-khanes became a focal point where
people gathered not just to drink coffee, but also to discuss, debate, write
about the hot button topics of the day. They became so popular that the
Governor of Mecca abolished them fearing the vigorous discussions and dissent
would disrupt his rule. Unrest broke out far and wide, the Sultan was finally forced to intervene.
He restored coffee to the public and order in the empire. Coffee was thus
established in the Muslim world. Up to late 16th century cultivation
was kept a closely guarded secret. Exports of fertile beans were prohibited.
However, a subcontinental chap smuggled back some
beans after a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1600. Coffee cultivation thus started in India. And in Europe, coffee made its way through trade first to Venice. Later the Pope
took a sip and became a fan. The first settlers took coffee to
Americas in the early 17th century, and by mid-17th a coffee club was set up in Oxford in England – the first members included luminaries like
Edmund Halley and Isaac Newton. This matured into the leading scientific
think tank of Britain – the Royal Society...
WC - 991
FCA
It often
seems to me that the night is even more richly coloured than the day, coloured
in the most intense violets, blues and greens. If you look carefully you’ll see
that some stars are lemony, others have a pink, green, forget-me-not blue glow.
And without labouring the point, it’s clear that to paint a starry sky it’s not
nearly enough to put white spots on blue-black.
Letter to Willemien Van Gogh, dated 8th-14th
Sept, 1888, Arles.
 |
| Credit. In some kind of a cosmic coincidence, Kirk Douglas passed away earlier this month and so prodded me into watching the Van Gogh film, Lust for Life. My interest in Van Gogh started with the original title, the book by Irving Stone (1934), which got made into the film (1956). Kirk Douglas is uncannily similar to the maestro though the film differs a bit from the actual life events of the artist. Also itching to watch the more recent film - Loving Vincent, when I can access it finally. |
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