Turkish Coffee & Fortune Reading with Mehmet Gökçe

Somewhere between the last sip and the turned cup, the afternoon slows down. That is the part we would like you to have.

Turkish coffee is made unhurriedly — ground fine as flour, brought up slowly in a copper cezve on hot sand, never stirred once the foam has formed. It arrives in a small cup with a glass of water and something sweet, and it is meant to be drunk in small mouthfuls, over conversation, for as long as the conversation lasts.

When your cup is empty, you place the saucer over it, turn it upside down, make a wish and wait for it to cool. Then Mehmet Gökçe — who runs this agency and has been reading cups since long before he started selling tours — lifts it and tells you what he sees. Roads and birds and fish and doorways; the shapes that generations of Turkish families have been finding in their coffee grounds for four hundred years.

Why we offer this

Honestly, because guests kept asking. What started as coffee at the end of a long day in the valleys turned into the thing people wrote to us about afterwards. So we stopped treating it as an accident and started setting proper time aside for it.

It is not a show. There is no costume and no script. It is one man, a copper pot and however long you want to sit there.

What the hour looks like

• Coffee brewed in front of you on hot sand, the way it is done here
• Turkish delight, and a glass of water first — always the water first
• Your cup turned, cooled, and read one by one if there are several of you
• Time afterwards to ask about Cappadocia, the valleys, or where to eat tonight

In Turkish, English or Spanish, whichever you prefer. Tell us when you book.

A note on taking it seriously

We will not tell you the cup is right. Come curious. Most people leave having laughed a good deal and thought about one or two things they were not expecting to think about — which is, more or less, what four centuries of Turkish families have got out of it too.