Unlike coffee chain stores with their sometimes bizarre hot-drink creations and their fast-food atmosphere, traditional European coffeehouses are places of culture and encounter, nooks of rest in the hustle and bustle of big-city life. Although, in Viennese tradition, legend has it that the first European coffeehouse was established in Vienna after the second Turkish siege of 1683 by an interpreter named Georg Franz Kolschitzky, the truth is that the first coffeehouse on European ground was opened, quite unsurprisingly, in Constantinople already in 1554, with Venice following 90 years later. It is true, however, that coffeehouses have come to be integral to a certain easy-going Bohemian lifestyle, and perhaps in particularly so in Vienna. The coffeehouse – where you are, in the words of fin-de-siècle poet Peter Altenberg, “not at home and still not out in the fresh air” – is where urbanites go to take time out, to sit and think, to read, work, socialize. Or, as writer and critic Alfred Polgar most poignantly put it: the coffeehouse is for people who “want to be alone but need company to do so.”
Slowakei | Ungarn | Tschechien | Wien | Niederosterreich | Burgenland | Feature
Cultural Oases
» Deutsch
