Note sull'episodio
Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki was born in 1640 in the village of Kulczyce, in present day western Ukraine but then part of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, to an Orthodox Ruthenian noble family whose father had converted to Catholicism. He spoke Polish, Ruthenian, Serbian, Turkish, German, Hungarian, and Romanian, and worked in Belgrade as a translator for the Austrian Oriental Company. When Ottoman authorities there rounded up suspected Austrian spies, he claimed Polish citizenship, since the Commonwealth was not then at war with the Ottomans, escaped to Vienna, and opened his own trading company in 1678.
In 1683, with Kara Mustafa Pasha's army besieging Vienna, Kulczycki and his Serbian servant George Mihailovic dressed in Turkish clothes and walked through the Ottoman camp singing Ottoman songs, reached Duke Charles of Lorraine, and slipped back in with word that relief was coming, which helped end talk of surrender. After John III Sobieski broke the siege on September 12, the city gave Kulczycki a cash reward and a house in Leopoldstadt, and he received sacks of captured coffee. The story that he then opened Vienna's first coffeehouse, the House Under the Blue Bottle, was invented by writer Gottfried Uhlich in 1783 for the siege's centenary.
- European soldiers took the abandoned coffee sacks for camel fodder, but Kulczycki knew what they were.
- In 1980 historian Karl Teply found in municipal records that the first coffee privilege went in 1685 to Armenian merchant Johannes Diodato.
- A Kulczycki descendant and historian rejected Teply's findings as pseudoscientific.
- An 1885 statue on Favoritenstrasse shows him in Turkish disguise pouring coffee, and a Vienna street bears his name.
- For decades Viennese café owners held an annual October feast in his honor and displayed his portrait in their windows.