ABSTRACT
Kolschitzki's first coffee-house was established in Vienna in 1684, one year after the Turkish siege and eighteen years after the first local opera performance. Both the opera and the coffee-house have baffled Viennese historians by their apparent indestructibility. Admittedly the coffee-house had long periods of decline, and its fall was often predicted, but after two hundred and eighty-four years the institution is still gloriously alive. Somehow it has remained, an island of free thought and free speech, an oasis of solitude or companionship, of meditation or conversation, the haven of the individualist and the refuge of the non-conformist, the last catacomb where Man can go underground with his secret thoughts and inner aspirations.
