MOJA DOMAĆA KAFA

I didn’t really drink coffee before I started travelling to Serbia. In the homecare clinic where I work with nurses and other health professionals, I used to be wellknown for having a corner of my office reserved for brewing all sorts of tea. I would promote health and relaxation for overworked people dealing with patients who had difficult problems, and tea is an easy sell in such a milieu. Back in those days, I couldn’t understand the addiction to

batch-produced and filtered coffee or the desiccated crystals of instant.

But then with my marriage to a Belgrade girl and the many trips to Serbia that followed, I came across the Ottoman contribution to the history of coffee culture. One afternoon, my father in-law brought out a solid metal coffee grinder and proceeded to demonstrate how the finest grind and the conical shape of the džezva combine

to produce the perfect coffee froth. I hadn ever encountered an odour, flavour, and texture such as this, and I was hooked immediately.

Adding to the charm is the presentation, depending on which former republic we happen to be in. I remember being served a coffee in Ohrid, Macedonia, which was accompanied by a small glass of sparkling water, a piece of lokrum, and the džezva with an extra half cup kept hot inside, all on a gilded platter. The only thing missing was the shot of rakija, but we’ll save that subject for another time. To me, the custom revealed the possibility of an inner state divorced from the usual troubles, relaxed to a different way of understanding the passage of time. Whenever I make this coffee, the odour awakens in me a reminder of why I fell in love with Serbia and its history.

It has been eight years since that coffeemaking lesson (which readies me for marriage, or so I have heard), and I can count on one hand the number of times I skipped my morning domaća kafa. It’s the only coffee I’ll ever drink. I learned to love the honesty of it: the proximity between the taste buds and the coffee bean, especially at the end when I can chew on some of the grounds. Unfiltered, without any obstacle, direct and to the point: all other coffee

traditions fail this test for me.

It is odd enough, I’m sure you’ll agree, that a Canadian boy winds up making his daily brew this way. But the Turkish coffee tradition, through its connection to so many people across all of the lands the Ottomans ever controlled or traded with, produced another surprise for me: a reflection of the beauty of my own ulticultural city.

It happened one day at work – picture sixteen cubicles - when I was making my coffee on a hot plate under my desk. From seven metres away, our physiotherapist, a lovely Azerbaijani fellow from Iran who was attracted by the smell, came over with a look of intense curiosity. When he saw my operation he became nostalgic to the point of tears, and then explained how it reminded him of his university days in Teheran in the late seventies, when

students from Lebanon, Syria and Turkey made their coffee the exact same way in the dormitories.

Now, in all of my travels I have never been further east than Dimitrovgrad. And yet here I was in Montreal practicing a custom I learned in Serbia and, through the propitious combination of olfaction with the random distribution of Canadian diversity, stimulating the nostalgia of a man from halfway around our planet! I reflected

on this miracle in terms of Serbia’s history, its rich and complex journey, all the ups and downs, the pain and the gain, and the things that the Serbs held onto across that long, arduous and yet affirming odyssey.

And I came to the conclusion that, by discovering Serbia’s heritage the way I have, I also benefit, inherit as a zet, and ultimately cherish these cultural treasures. But, given the way I make my coffee, I find myself faced with a legitimate and possibly troubling question: am I slowly turning into a Serb?