Transcarpathians were introduced to coffee by the Turks back in the days when our region was part of the Hungarian Kingdom. The consumption of this unusual drink for our region became synonymous with wealth and luxury, and therefore the first to drink coffee were members of the noble families of Druget, Bercheny, Pereny, etc. The opportunity to enjoy coffee was a privilege of wealthy families for a long time, and only in the second half of the 19th century did the first coffee houses appear in Uzhgorod, similar to European “coffee houses”. So at the turn of the century, the “KAVÉHÁZ” coffee shop operated in the premises of the “Crown”, and already in 1925 there were 6 coffee houses in the city: “Bercheny”, “Korona”, “Orient”, “Praga”, “Slavia”, “Sport”. Since the second half of the 1930s, the so-called “Purma” coffee shop and confectionery workshop (named after the owner Bohumil Purma), which was located in the “Legio” building, has been gaining increasing popularity. On Rashynova Street in 1930, there was a shop of the world-famous Julius Meinl brand, which mainly sold coffee and tea. You could also taste and buy coffee: in beans, ground – in many shops that sold so-called colonial goods. An example is the shop of K. Fundanych, from which the exhibition presents more than 30 exhibits.
In the fund collections of the Transcarpathian Regional Museum of Local Lore named after T. Legotsky, a notable place is occupied by a collection of mills for grinding coffee and other products from the late 19th – early 20th centuries. The collection includes 29 coffee grinders. The collection was formed by purchasing exhibits from private individuals. Its basis was the personal collection of Kramsky V. M., which the museum purchased in 1981. The devices presented here are exclusively of European manufacture. Of these, 8 are Czechoslovak-made grinders of the brands “Aero”, “Sphinx”, “B. O.”, “Java”, 7 – Austrian manufacturers “Leinbrocks-Reform”, “F. O.”, “Ideal”, “Goldenberg” and 3 – German “M. G. St. Garantirt”. There are also coffee grinders made by artisans in our region. In particular, one copy from the villages of Bushtyno and Kobyletskaya Polyana. All grinders belong to the European type with a characteristic square, mainly wooden box, at the bottom of which there was a sliding drawer for ground coffee. A metal mechanism for grinding was attached to the upper part.
