Guide
Tahmis means the place where coffee is pounded, and that is what the name records: in earlier times coffee was pounded here in large mortars of walnut wood, with tools made of black stone or of the same wood. The Tahmis coffee house in Gaziantep was built in 1638 by Mustafa Ağa, the Turkmen chief and sanjak bey, to produce income for the Mevlevi lodge. It is a two-storey building, and the story attached to it is that Murad IV rested here during his Baghdad campaign and was served coffee at the Tahmis — repeated locally as tradition rather than record.
The coffee house did not survive unbroken. It, along with the shops and the han, burned down completely in two great fires between 1901 and 1903. Feyzullahoglu Şeyh Mehmet Munip Efendi, who was then the sheikh of the Mevlevi lodge, spent 130,000 kurus of his own money to rebuild the Buğday Han, the Tahmis coffee house and 33 shops, and endowed them to the lodge in 1904. The coffee house is on the Kültür Yolu route, at Arasa Meydanı in the Elmaci market, within walking distance of the city centre.
