Ah, coffee and lost cities—what a delicious combo! The most famous myth is that of Kaldi, the Ethiopian goat herder who saw his goats dancing after nibbling some red berries. He brought the berries to a monastery, and the monks supposedly brewed the first cup of coffee. It’s a neat story, but the details are fuzzy. Some historians argue the monks were actually the first to roast the beans, while others say the legend was just a clever way to explain why coffee was so intoxicating. Now, tie that to a lost city or forgotten trade route. The early monks would have shipped their brew across the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula, then along the incense trade routes that stretched into the heart of the Arabian Desert. The ancient city of Sana'a in Yemen was a major hub—think of it as the “lost city” where coffee was refined into the “qahwa” that made its way to the Ottoman Empire. There’s even a faint tale of a “city of spices” in the Zagros Mountains, supposedly abandoned after a drought, where a monk allegedly found a stash of roasted beans. The story gets muddied with translations and tourists’ legends, so the evidence is as shaky as a pottery shard on a tide of sand. In short, coffee’s first brewing in monasteries is a blend of fact and folklore, and its spread through forgotten trade routes is as much myth as it is history. I keep digging—one day I’ll find the actual monastery, but until then, I’ll keep cataloguing these contradictions and sipping my own brew.