The process for brewing Turkish coffee looks simple, but in reality can be quite finicky. Heat it too quickly in the rakwa and the foam will collapse; add too much water and the foam will never even rise to begin with. Only a few months ago, I began to drink Turkish coffee regularly; it took me days of practice to coax from the brew the thick, foamy top I remembered from my aunties’ houses. 

Always, after a family gathering, the women of my family would sit around a large glass table, on gold, ornate couches whose dark-wood frame was engraved with designs— each of us propped up on tasseled throw pillows— to drink Turkish coffee. When each one finished their cup, they placed the saucer on top of the teacup, held the cup with both hands— thumbs on the saucer— and in one swift flip towards the heart, set the cup upside down. Over the next few minutes, the thick sludge of coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup would drip down the sides. Dark streaks and smudges would then dry into a kind of sacred map of the past, present, and future.

As a child, I would force myself to sip this bitter drink in order to be part of the ritual that came after, the one that the women around me partook in and that I observed with utter awe and admiration. When the grounds were dry, a hush would fall around the room as two women— usually one of them being my aunt— hunched over a cup. There is no manual or formula for how to interpret the images that reveal themselves to someone who reads Turkish coffee grounds. It is a form of creative transmission that is impossible to codify, probably because it carries an intimacy that printed words cannot actually truly capture. Reading a cup is, at its root, the intersection of pattern recognition and generous improvisation. I recall once, how I read the cup of my Turkish friend after we drank coffee together; “Incredible,” he said, “My girl friends in Turkey read it the exact way you do. The exact same energy, intonation, words and phrases, just in a different language.” 

I have been told I have “the gift” of reading; a distant cousin in her fifties told me so when I was a teenager. I have read many people’s cups— friends, cousins, and strangers alike— and been surprised at how often the interpretations land. Men in my family, my father among them, almost always scoff at the concept altogether; but decades ago, early in my mother’s pregnancy with my brother— far before she and my father had told anyone— a cousin read her cup with amazement. “Are you pregnant?” she asked. 

“No!” my mother exclaimed, “Of course I’m not.” But the cousin persisted, eyeing the cup. “I see that you’re pregnant,” she said, “And it’s a boy.” My mother did not even know the gender of the baby yet.

The way I learned to read coffee grounds was after years of others reading mine. My aunt always explained to me when she read my cup— here is an evil eye. Here is a fish. Here is a chicken. Here is a woman running. Here is a ladder. What do you see? Perhaps I had a wild imagination as a child, but within the chaotic streaks I too saw stories, pictures, warnings, and good news within my cup, whose delicate rim and outside walls were always dark with coffee stains, evidence of multiple, ongoing girlhood crushes. 

As I look back on the incredibly difficult history that the women in my family were swept up in, I think of my grandmother: married at fourteen, losing her first child, fleeing Iraq with my grandfather, beginning life again in Iran, then surviving a brain tumor. A generation later came the Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, in which my aunts faced unimaginable hardships and pain, constantly forced to improvise their way out of perilous situations. I realize now that it was this very creativity and instinct required for reading coffee grounds that allowed them all to survive war, expulsion, and conflict. 

Despite the hardships they experienced, they never lost their spark for life or their sense of humor. My grandmother— a gifted storyteller— used to sit with her friends in Iran drinking Turkish coffee, and sometimes, upon looking at one of their cups after, would gasp and turn away. “I can’t read today,” she would tease, until they desperately begged her to continue and tell them what she saw. 

The art, at least within my family, is fading; I realized, as I recently returned to the ritual, how few in my generation, or even my father’s generation, have kept it. One aunt of mine still reads; a distant older cousin, too. But as far as I’m concerned, among my cousins within my generation, I’m the only one that knows how to read coffee grounds. No one has intentionally rejected it, of course. It’s just that we live in a world so much different than the one my grandmother grew up in, a world that is modern, globalized, and dispersed. 

We don’t have villages anymore; my cousins and I aren’t getting together and drinking coffee every day. We all live in different parts of the world, and if we’re lucky, see each other once every few years. Even with the older generation of my family, gatherings grow fewer and farther between as people live their lives, move away, or take their leave from this world, as we all do one day. The circumstances required for passing on the practice simply don’t exist anymore. The way it continued was through community— real community— where family, friends, and neighbors used to just pop by for a chat, or fold laundry together. It cannot be intentionally taught. It’s a natural process passed down from years of watching elder women in the family read cups, tell stories, confide and give advice to one another. 

I learned from years of watching my aunt read cups, who learned it from years of watching her mother— my grandmother— read cups, who must have learned it from her mother or aunties, and so on. It was always a women’s art, social and unrecorded, passed down in kitchens and living rooms. I’m determined to make my own “village,” even if it’s something I have to cultivate; because the world doesn’t offer one ready-made like it used to.

Inshallah, one day I’ll make Turkish coffee for my daughters too. • 

Maia Zelkha is the editor of Yad Mizrah. Along with being a contributor for Brill’s Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, she also serves as an adjunct fellow at the Z3 Institute. She lives in a moshav in central Israel.