Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki (Ukrainian: Юрій-Франц Кульчицький) (1640 – February 19, 1694), of the Sas coat of arms, was a Polish- Ukrainian member of szlachta of Orthodox faith[1], merchant, spy, diplomat and soldier, and considered a hero by the people of Vienna for his actions at the 1683 Battle of Vienna. According to a popular legend, he opened the first café in the city, using coffee beans left by the retreating Ottoman Turks.
His name often rendered in German as Georg Franz Kolschitzky.
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Kulczycki was born in 1640 in Kulchytsi, near Sambir, (then part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, now western Ukraine[2]). He was born into an old Orthodox-Ruthenian noble family, Kulchytsky-Shelestovich, although his father had converted to Catholicism. As a young man, Kulczycki joined the Zaporozhian Cossacks during which time he demonstrated a gift for languages and worked as an interpreter. Captured by the Turks, he was bought by Serbian merchants who needed a translator. He was fluent in the Turkish, German, Hungarian, Romanian, and Polish languages. Kulczycki started to work as a translator for the Belgrade branch of the Austrian Oriental Company (Orientalische Handelskompagnie). When the Turkish authorities began repressing foreign traders as spies, he avoided arrest by claiming Polish citizenship and moved to Vienna, where through his earlier work he had gathered enough wealth to open up his own trading company in 1678.[3][4]
During the Battle of Vienna in 1683, he volunteered to leave the besieged and starving city and contact Duke Charles of Lorraine. Together with his trusty servant, the Serbian Đorđe Mihajlović, he left the city in Turkish attire and crossed enemy lines singing Ottoman songs. After contacting the duke, the pair managed to return to the city and reach it with a promise of imminent relief. Because of that information, the city council decided not to surrender to the Turkish forces of Kara Mustafa Pasha and continue the fight instead.
After the arrival of Christian forces led by the Polish king Jan III Sobieski, on September 12, the siege was broken. Kulczycki was considered a hero by the grateful townspeople of Vienna. The city council awarded him with a considerable sum of money while the burghers gave him a house in the borough of Leopoldstadt. King Jan III Sobieski himself presented Kulczycki with large amounts of coffee found in the captured camp of Kara Mustafa's army.
Kulczycki opened a coffee house in Vienna at Schlossergassl near the cathedral. It was named the Hof zur Blauen Flasche (‘House under the Blue Bottle’). Kulczycki's abilities helped popularize coffee in Austria and with time his café became one of the most popular places in town. Kulczycki always served the mortar-ground coffee wearing a Turkish attire, which added to the place's popularity. Another of his innovations was to serve coffee with milk, a manner that was unknown to the Turks. Probably he was also the inventor of croissants, cakes in shape of "turkish half-moon".
He remains a popular folk hero and the patron of all Viennese café owners even though his café closed soon after his death on February 20, 1694. Until recently, every year in October a special Kolschitzky feast was organized by the café owners of Vienna, who decorated their shop windows with Kulczycki's portrait, as noted by Zygmunt Gloger. Kulczycki is memorialized with a statue on Vienna's Kolschitzky street. Sculpture of Kulczycki at the corner of a street named after him
