Coffee is a matter of hours. Stamboul, outside Ramadan, is deserted at night, and it is just after twilight that the coffeehouses are at their best. Throughout the month of Ramadan, the purely Turkish coffeehouses close by day and stay open all night; it is in that month only that one can see, in some of the largest, the Karagöz, the Turkish shadow theater.

Ukers 1922, ch. XXXV, citing Dwight (1915)

Christian coffeehouses follow the calendar of the Church, as Turkish ones follow that of Ramadan. Coffee has no schedule of its own: it takes that of the religion of its customers.

Each quarter celebrates its patron saint with a panayiri, that is, a three-day patronal festival. The street is decked with flags, tables move out onto the pavement, and the room thus overflows outside.

One detail scandalizes the observer: men and women dance there together, to the sound of the lanterna, the barrel organ peculiar to Constantinople. The rest of the year, the coffeehouse of Constantinople gathers only men.

Ukers 1922, ch. XXXV, citing Dwight (1915)