Divan (furniture)

A divan (Turkish divan, originally from Persian devan[1]) is a piece of couch-like sitting furniture or, in some countries, a box-spring based bed.

Portrait de Monsieur Levett et Mademoiselle Glavany Assis Sur un Divan en Costume Turc by Jean-Etienne Liotard (Louvre)

A psychiatric patient tells his story as he lays on a divan

Primarily, in the Middle East (especially the Ottoman Empire), a divan was a long seat formed of a mattress laid against the side of the room, upon the floor or upon a raised structure or frame, with cushions to lean against.

Divans received this name because they were generally found along the walls in Middle Eastern council chambers of a bureau called divan or diwan (from Persian, meaning a government council or office, from the bundles of papers they processed, and next their council chambers).

Divans are a common feature of the liwan, a long, vaulted, narrow room in Levantine homes. The divan in the sense of a sofa or couch entered the English language in 1702 and has been commonly known in Europe since about the middle of the 18th century. It was fashionable, roughly from 1820 to 1850, wherever the romantic movement in literature penetrated. All the boudoirs of that generation were garnished with divans. They spread to coffee-houses, which were sometimes known as divans or Turkish divans, and a cigar divan remains a familiar expression. This is preserved today in Bulgarian, and in Hungarian as dívány, Italian as Divano, Romanian as divan,[2] and Russian as диван (divan).

Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic couch was a divan, draped with a heavy Persian rug and cushions, given to him as a gift from a patient.