Talking without tea is like a night without a moon

/DI LI – Labor Newspaper/

While Chinese people like to drink green tea, red tea is a part of Turkish culture. On every street corner I looked at in Istanbul’s older residential areas, people were sipping red tea in small glass cups with a tulip-shaped mouth. The cup must be precisely that shape to be considered Earth tea. Therefore, the teaspoon should also fit the cup; its size is always smaller than tea spoons from other countries.

Illustration by Choai.

That day, I wandered into an alley in the ancient residential area of Balat. A few middle-aged men dressed in shop uniforms with bland old faces sat on rudimentary wooden chairs on the sidewalk, drinking red tea. It’s a very affordable tea shop with less than one Lira per cup of tea. It’s okay to call it sidewalk tea. They didn’t talk about anything, no football and no politics, probably just sitting there looking at the old streets and alleys to pass the rest of a series of dull days. But maybe that’s why the tea tastes better when people put their whole soul into the drops of pink tea and “meditate” in the shabby windows.

In the early 20th century, the Turks began to drink tea, but at first, it was only an alternative drink when the price of coffee became too high. Hundreds of years later, that reluctant crab dish made the entire people of the Black Sea region crazy and addicted to the point of ranking first in the ranking of countries consuming the most tea in the world, with 6.87 kg of tea. Per capita, it is equivalent to 1,000 cups of tea per year. Other tea-addicted countries, such as Morocco and England, are still behind. Tea is drunk by the Turks with breakfast daily, when inviting guests to their homes, meeting in shops, or even when negotiating for many carpets at the Grand Bazaar and sitting leisurely on the ferry across the Bosphorus Bay. We also had to invite each other for a cup of tea. That’s why they have the idiom: Talking without tea is like a night without the moon.

Turkish tea-drinking utensils also look like “One Thousand and One Nights”, but they are a different style from Moroccans. The tea tray is a small shaped aluminum tray with a three-tight handle made of copper wire. And the beautiful cups and pots on the tray make people want to try Black Sea tea once (1). In addition to the lovely shape of the tulip-shaped cup, the tea set must have two floors called Caydanlik (2). The mother kettle, the baby kettle, or the twin kettles often look identical. The kettle on the upper floor stores dry tea, while people put water in to boil on the lower floor. In any case, two kettles must be stacked on top of each other for convenience. Water is filled into the lower kettle and placed on top to boil. When the water boils, the heat from the lower kettle will cause the tea in the upper kettle to expand; then, when the water boils, the person making the tea will slowly remove the kettle to pour water on top and wait ten minutes until the tea is cooked. Thus, red tea will cook more with steam than directly poured boiling water, which Black Sea people believe will rot the tea leaves and spoil the taste, making it more bitter. In this 4.0 era, Caydanlik twin kettles sold in supermarkets are made of smooth stainless steel for easy cleaning. People even make electric kettles to keep up with the times. But a traditional kettle should be made of aluminum or copper with delicate carvings. Caydanlik’s handle is also quite strange, looking like a curved panhandle instead of a semicircle attached to the wall like all kettles in the world I’ve seen.

Earth tea rarely mixes spices other than the extremely popular apple tea flavoring. But when drinking tea, people must sip something sweet to neutralize the aromatic taste of the tea. Therefore, even without adding milk or sugar to tea, any Turkish person knows how to make tea better by holding a small sugar cube in his mouth and then sipping the tea, letting the sugar gradually dissolve and blend. The taste of tea is like wool to the ultimate pleasure. Turkish red tea is black tea, but when poured into a tulip-shaped cup, its sweet red ripples through the clear glass. And on the fairy-like tea tray, people will place next to a plate of traditional Turkish sweets with so many flavors and colors that children will have to skip the tea and instead eat the candy. The candy is sweet and chewy like sesame seeds, half like gum candy, and fragrant like chip-chip candy. Tea, candy, and tea must be combined. Earth tea is less bitter than the Thai Nguyen tea my father still brews and often sips with sausage candy, peanut candy, and sesame candy.
Tra Tho can sit in an elegant place, but the flea market is also complete. It was entertained even at the royal court, but it was no less poetic when sitting at a small table on the side of the road. Also, while attending the Mevlevi Sema ceremony at the waiting room of the Sirkesi Orient Express train station, where Muslim priests performed a spinning dance ritual, I closed my eyes as the monks’ robes rotated hypnotically. The tulip-shaped red tea cup kept tilting gradually in my hand until it dropped a pink drop on the cotton dress I was wearing. Until now, no super-cleaning detergent has wholly removed that Turkish tea stain. Strangely, every time I see the blur, like a virtual shadow on the fabric, I remember the 1 Lira tea cup in the Balat area and the way boring middle-aged men are lost in tea like there’s never been a better drink than that.

1. Rize province on the east coast of the Black Sea has the world’s sixth-largest tea production.

2. “Spicy” in Turkish means tea, pronounced “chay”, while Indians also call tea similar to “chai”, and Chinese people call it “cha”.