This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
For centuries in Ethiopia, coffee was not everyone's drink. Coffee has grown wild in the highlands of southwestern Ethiopia, in the historic zone called Kafa, for longer than anyone bothered to write down, and by the time the plant crossed the Red Sea into Yemen sometime before the fifteenth century, it had already become bound up with a specific religious world: the ritualized, hospitality-centered brewing and sharing of coffee that would become the Ethiopian and Eritrean coffee ceremony traces, per UNESCO's own account, to Sufi Muslim mystical practice. For a long stretch of Ethiopian history that mattered in a very literal, exclusionary way. Coffee drinking was, as UNESCO's Courier puts it plainly, forbidden for Ethiopian Christians, restricted instead to the country's Muslim population, whose devotional life had given the drink and its preparation their religious charge in the first place.
That changed under one ruler, at a specific and fairly late date. Menelik II, who reigned over Ethiopia from 1889 to 1913, actively encouraged Christian subjects to take up coffee drinking, unwinding a centuries-old religious boundary by monarchical decision rather than gradual drift. It is a strange kind of history to have this precisely attached to a single reign: an everyday household ritual, now practiced by Christian and Muslim Ethiopian families alike up to three times a day, crossed a hard religious line within adult memory of people whose own grandparents would have been born on the other side of it.
The ceremony that resulted, called buna, is not a quick cup. Green beans are washed and roasted over hot coals in full view of the guests, ground by hand, and boiled in a narrow-necked clay pot called a jebena, then served in small handleless cups called sini across three deliberate rounds. The rounds are not just refills; they are named, in Arabic-derived terms that survive from the ceremony's Sufi-inflected roots regardless of who is now drinking it: abol, tona, and, last, baraka, meaning blessing outright. Incense typically burns throughout, and the floor is often freshened with grass and flowers, the whole performance built to slow down, not speed up, an afternoon.
Popular tourism writing likes to push the ceremony's origin back further still, sometimes centuries further, than anything UNESCO, Britannica, or the Smithsonian's own museum record will support in print. What is solidly documented is narrower and, if anything, more interesting: a religiously bounded practice, restricted for generations, that one emperor's policy opened to an entire nation, leaving both communities sharing a ritual whose vocabulary still remembers where it came from.