Editor's Corner

Good morning, folks! One of my favorite contributors of ideas for Editor’s Corner sent me a Facebook clip of a new word (at least to me): zarf. A zarf (plural: zarfs or zarves) is a cup holder. Here is a zarf that you may be familiar with:

Growing up in Seattle, where coffee is king, I expect I would know this. Then again, when I was making espresso for one of my first employers, we didn’t have zarves. I would say it is because they are fairly new, but actually they are more than 800 years old.

Let’s look at the zarves of Turkey. In Turkey, the word for zarf is zarflar. In Arabic, it is zuruuf. From Wikipedia:

It was around the 13th century in Turkey, when coffee became popular as a beverage. The serving of coffee in Turkey was a complex, ritualized process.

It was served in small cups without handles…which were placed in holders known as zarf…(meaning "container" or "envelope") to protect the cup and also the fingers of the drinker from the hot liquid.

Cups were typically made of porcelain, but also of glass and wood.

Some of these zarfs were ostentatious, made of silver, gold, copper, brass, ivory, bone, tortoise shell, precious gems, and stones. They were filigreed, engraved, and painted. In the 1800s, Geneva started making “zarf sets” for the Islamic world, made with enamel which was bright and decorative.

Here are some historical zarfs from the Facebook clip:

This one was considered “plain”:

Here is one with a porcelain cup on the side:

This one, with Turkish motifs:

A bejeweled example from the Ottomans:

One that is probably worth more than our home:

And finally, a zarf set from Geneva:

Maybe next time I go to Starbucks, I’ll ask for my coffee in one of the more traditional zarfs!

Kara Church | Technical Editor, Advisory | Knowledge Enablement

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