How was espresso introduced in Athens ?

One can understand a lot of things about a city simply by visiting its cafes. The everyday history of every city influences and also gets influenced by the inhabitants' best known everyday habit, coffee. While in the majority of European capitals historical faces are still able to tell this story, in Athens most of the historical places that could give us pictures of the habit of coffee (and thus, of all the everyday life) during past decades have almost disappeared.

Coffee drinking has a deep rooted tradition in the city of Athens. Living on the frontier of East and West, the Athenians always enjoyed the habit of coffee in everyday life. The coffee place was not only about the enjoyment of the drink itself, but it was also an opportunity for discussion, social gathering and political talking. Of course, until the interwar era, Greeks only enjoyed the Greek Coffee, or the “erateinos”, the beloved, as the coffee-maniacs poets of that era used to call it.

But in 1933, a small shop in the center of Athens, on Boukourestiou St, makes the difference. It uses stalls instead of marble tables ;  it does not serve Greek coffee, but it introduces something new : at “Café Brasilian”, the Athenians have for the first time the opportunity to taste a coffee that will become their new favourite habit : espresso.

The Athenians may be fanciful coffee lovers, do not seem to like changes. The "new" coffee, espresso, seems strong and bitter for their taste, and its habit of drinking coffee without being properly seated, unthinkable. Observing tourists from the neighboring luxury hotels of Syntagma Square enjoying the superb quality of "Café Brasilian" espresso, they start tasting the new coffee. Lots of people gather at “Brazilian” stalls looking for a cup of espresso coffee : workers, politicians, tourists, passers-by and, of course, writers.

Open minded and always open to all kinds of changes, artists are always the first to adopt new habits. It would not be a great exaggeration to say that the espreso mania of Athens started because of the writers and poets who were willing to leave the marble tables and the Greek coffee  for a cup of fragrant espresso at the “Brasilian” Café.

Lots of artists used to hang out at “Brasilian”, such as Odysseus Elytis, Manos Hatzidakis, Giannis Tsarouchis, Andreas Embirikos and countless others. Author Kostas Tachtsis took his love one step further: he devoted a whole book to his new favourite place and his new habit, giving it the title “I Simfonia tou Brazilian”.

Today, espresso is part of our everyday life and has become, over the years, another favorite habit. Although nowadays there are no coffee places quite glamorous as “Café Brazilian”, we can turn our own home  into an interwar café, choosing a good quality espresso, or we can simply  combine enjoyment with ease, choosing one of the dozens of options for espresso capsules.