Changes

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).

Samovars fell out of use after Poland regained independence a hundred years ago and are almost completely forgotten now in this country (unlike in Russia, where they are still very much a thing). But the Russian way of brewing tea, although simplified, is still very much alive in Poland. Many Poles still brew a very strong tea (which they call ''esencja'', or tea essence) to later dilute it with hot water. Incidentally, tea was the favourite drink of Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the father of the Polish Republic. The Poles had no choice but to stick to tea.