page_title: Viennese coffee house
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Viennese coffee house / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Café Dommayer, Vienna, Austria Deutsch: Café Dommayer, Hietzing, Wien
context_page_description: The Viennese coffee house is a typical institution of Vienna that played an important part in shaping Viennese culture.
  Since October 2011 the "Viennese Coffee House Culture" is listed as "Intangible Cultural Heritage" in the Austrian inventory of the "National Agency for the Intangible Cultural Heritage", a part of UNESCO. The Viennese coffee house is described in this inventory as a place, "where time and space are consumed, but only the coffee is found on the bill."
context_section_description: Legend has it that soldiers of the Polish-Habsburg army, while liberating Vienna from the second Turkish siege in 1683, found a number of sacks with strange beans that they initially thought were camel feed and wanted to burn. The Polish king Jan III Sobieski granted the sacks to one of his officers named Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki, who started the first coffee house. This story was published by the Catholic Priest Gottfried Uhlich in 1783 in his History of the second Turkish Siege, and he took some liberties. In reality, Kulczycki's coffee house missed being the first by more than a year. A more factual account has been reported by Karl Teply.
  After some experimentation, the legend goes on, Kulczycki added some sugar and milk, and the Viennese coffee tradition was born. This achievement has been recognized in many modern Viennese coffeehouses by hanging a picture of Kulczycki in the window. Another account is that Kulczycki, having spent two years in Ottoman captivity, knew perfectly well what coffee really was and tricked his superiors into granting him the beans that were considered worthless.
  According to recent research, Vienna's first coffee house was in fact opened by an Armenian businessman named Johannes Diodato in 1685. 15 years later, four Greek owned coffeehouses had the privilege to serve coffee.
  The new drink was well received, and coffee houses began to pop up rapidly. In the early period, the various drinks had no names, and customers would select the mixtures from a colour-shaded chart.
  The heyday of the coffee house was the turn of the nineteenth century when writers like Peter Altenberg, Alfred Polgar, Egon Friedell, Karl Kraus, Hermann Broch and Friedrich Torberg made them their preferred place of work and pleasure. Many famous artists, scientists, and politicians of the period such as Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Adolf Loos, Theodor Herzl, Alfred Adler, and even Leon Trotsky were constant coffee house patrons. In Prague, Budapest, Krakow, and Lviv and other cities of the Austro-Hungarian empire there were also many coffee houses according to the Viennese model.
  In the 1950s, the period of "coffee house death" began, as many famous Viennese coffee houses had to close. This was due to the popularity of television and the appearance of modern espresso bars. Nevertheless, many of these classic Viennese coffee houses still exist. A renewed interest in their tradition and tourism have prompted a comeback. Some relatively modern Viennese coffee houses have emerged in North America, such as Julius Meinl Chicago and Kaffeehaus de Châtillon in the greater Seattle area and Cafe Sabarsky in Manhattan.
caption: Café Dommayer in Vienna
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