Changes

The Russian way is different still. First you boil water in a big metal urn called ''samovar'', or "self-boiler". Then you open a tap in the side of the urn to pour the boiling water into a teapot filled with tea leaves and put the pot on top of the ''samovar'', where it continues to be heated by the water. You let the leaves steep for some time until you brew a very strong tea called ''zavarka''. Once it's ready, you pour some ''zavarka'' into glasses (yes, glasses!) and fill with more boiling water from the tap. This way everyone can adjust the strength of their tea to their liking. Each glass is placed in a special metal holder called ''podstakannik'', or "under-glass", so that you don't scorch your fingers. A typical ''podstakannik'' is made of some sort of nickel alloy; in the past, wealthy Russians used to have their ''podstakanniki'' made of silver, but they quickly realized that this metal is too good a heat conductor. So you've got your ''zavarka'' brewed in your ''samovar'', all you need now is to sweeten your tea with some fruits cooked in syrup, known as ''varenye''.

If you looked closely enough at the graph at the top of this post, you may have noticed that Turkey – the country all of Europe learned to drink coffee from – is a tea-drinking nation today. How did this come to pass? The answer, in a nutshell, is World War I happened. The Ottoman Empire lost all of its territorial possessions in the Middle East and all the coffee-growing regions with them. Deprived of easy access to their favourite drink, the Turks looked to the north. Their Muslim neighbours in Soviet Azerbaijan were drinking tea, a custom they had gleaned from the Persians and the Russians. And if tea could be grown as far north as Soviet Georgia, then why not try planting tea bushes on the slopes of Turkish hills overlooking the Black Sea? That's what President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the father of the Turkish Republic, thought; and so the Turks had no other choice than to start drinking tea (or ''çay'' in Turkish).