Grand Bazaar (Kapali Carsi)

The covered market of Kapali Carsi grew up around a small stone bedesten that Mehmed II ordered built soon after the capture of Constantinople in 1453. Income from the trading rows went towards the upkeep of Hagia Sophia, and this determined the scale of the development: by the seventeenth century a whole system of covered streets, hans and warehouses had spread around the first depot. Fires and earthquakes, above all the devastating one of 1894, changed the appearance of the market again and again, so the present vaults and walls are assembled from buildings of different periods. Today it contains more than sixty streets and around four thousand shops, distributed on the old guild principle: separate quarters are given over to jewellers, others to carpets, leather, antiques and tableware. More than twenty gates open onto different parts of the Old City, and above the main one, Nuruosmaniye, is set the Ottoman coat of arms with the tughra. It is easy to lose your bearings inside, because the streets cross at unexpected angles and the height of the vaults and the colour of the painted decoration change from quarter to quarter. In the quiet side passages old hans with inner courtyards survive, where workshops are still at work.

On the map