Michele and Gudrun Wish You a Happy New Year

The Birth of a Breakfast

Vienna, July 1683 - After the fall of Constantinople, the Ottoman empire was expanding.  Its armies overran Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia. Ottoman rule covered most of central and southern Hungary. They plundered cities, took slaves, turned churches into mosques, and converted many thousands of Christian captives to Islam at the point of a sword.

The Ottomans had designs on Vienna, which they had last attacked in 1529.  King Leopold had fled, leaving only a small garrison (11,000) and a few thousand volunteer citizens ( about 5,000) in control of the city.  Civilians, of course, were there to do the necessary...  like bake bread.

This tiny garrison was no match for the army of 140,000 that surrounded them, but the Turks decided to starve the city into submission rather than attempt a frontal assault on its defenses.

When the King John III Sobieski of Poland set off for Vienna in early September, the Viennese garrison was in desperate straits. The people of the city were starving, and the city had suffered serious damage from the Turkish bombardment.   The relief forces had already arrived as the Turks attempted to tunnel under the walls and set off a bomb  that would throw the city open to the Turkish forces once and for all.  Unfortunately for the Turks, the Austrians within the city had mounted a counter-tunneling operation.    Bakers working through the night heard the tunnelers and raised the alarm.  Austrian “moles” then entered the Turkish tunnel, found the bomb, and defused it.

At about the same time the Polish King, in the vanguard of his fearsome Winged Hussars and with 20,000 men behind him, led a cavalry charge down a hill into the flank of the Ottoman army. The hussars were one of the most formidable fighting forces of the time, and the sound of the wind through the feathers of their artificial wings was said to unnerve the horses of the enemy and drive superstitious soldiers into a panic.   Their wings fluttering and zipping like ferocious, spear-wielding birds of prey, thousands of hussars plowed into the Turkish force, driving them back, plundering their supply train, and driving the Turks from the field.
 
It would be the furthest west the Ottoman Empire would ever advance.

Amongst the supplies the Turks abandoned were tons of coffee...

The bakers celebrated the victory by copying the symbol from the Turkish flag and baking the kipfel (or crescent).  Kipfels turned into croissants when 15-year-old Austrian princess Marie Antoinette arrived in France in 1770 to marry the future king.  Parisian bakers started turning out kipfels in her honor...

The Viennese bakers commemorated the Polish cavalry charge with a bun called the bügel (stirrup).  We know it as the bagel.

Hmmmm.....  Viennese coffee houses and a continental breakfast...  :=)

Totally unrelated to New Year's...  :=P

Merry Christmas from Gudrun and Michele