Downhill from the Grand Bazaar to the Golden Horn

Kapalıçarşı, the Grand Bazaar, grew around a stone hall that Mehmed II had built in the years after the conquest of 1453: the Cevahir Bedesteni, the hall of jewels, whose vaults served the city as a strongroom. The covered streets around it still carry the names of the trades that once filled them. Kalpakçılar Caddesi, the widest of them, is named for the makers of fur caps, and now sells gold.

Today the old hall is where the antique dealers and the old silver are. Go on a weekday morning, before the groups, and treat the bazaar as the beginning of the walk rather than the whole of it. Beyond its walls the quarter falls away towards the Golden Horn, under the Süleymaniye on its hill.

The hans behind it

Around the bazaar and down the slope behind it stand the hans, courtyard buildings where merchants once lodged, stored their goods and kept their workshops. Several are still workshops. In Zincirli Han, a small courtyard of the early 1700s within the bazaar, silversmiths and jewellers sit at their benches upstairs. In a few of the others, scrap from the workshops is still melted down at small furnaces into metal that can be worked again.

Outside the bazaar, on Çakmakçılar Yokuşu, is Büyük Valide Han: the great han of the queen mother, built in 1651 by Kösem Sultan, mother of two sultans. It is worn now, and still at work: tailors, dyers and jewellers in the rooms around its courts. These are workplaces, so ask before you photograph anyone in them. In the workshops nobody is selling to you, which is the pleasure of it.

Down through Mahmutpaşa

From the bazaar’s Mahmutpaşa gate the street drops towards Eminönü, and this is where Istanbul does its own shopping: cloth and yarn, clothes and shoes, everything for a wedding down to the henna night before it, at prices that bring people from all over the city. It is busy every day, and shoulder to shoulder in the days before a bayram, one of the two religious holidays, when families come for the children’s holiday clothes. Keep your bag in front of you. At noon the shopkeepers eat at an esnaf lokantası, a tradesmen’s restaurant, from dishes cooked that morning; time the walk to join them.

On the way down is Kürkçü Han, the furriers’ han, built in the 1460s by Mehmed II’s grand vizier Mahmud Pasha, whose mosque gave the quarter its name. It is one of the oldest hans in the city, and upstairs it sells yarn, knitting needles and buttons.

At the bottom, in the streets of Tahtakale, a narrow staircase climbs from the shops to a mosque that is easy to walk past. Sinan built it for the grand vizier Rüstem Pasha on a terrace above the shops, and it is lined, inside and under its porch, with İznik tiles: tulips and carnations, a prunus tree in flower, and a tomato red that İznik’s potters had only lately begun to use. After four years of restoration it reopened in November 2020. Dress as for any mosque, and do not go at prayer times.

The Spice Bazaar and the water

A few streets east is the Spice Bazaar, built in the 1660s as part of the complex of the New Mosque beside it; the rents of its shops paid for the mosque’s upkeep. Its Turkish name, Mısır Çarşısı, means the Egyptian Bazaar: it was built with revenues from Egypt.

Buy here what travels: sumac; pul biber, the red pepper flakes of the Turkish table, and isot, the darker, smokier pepper of Urfa; dried apricots and figs; and lokum, Turkish delight. Coffee is better bought in the streets around it, where the city buys its own. Saffron comes from the stigmas of a crocus, picked by hand, and is costly by nature. Safflower, aspir in Turkish, is a cheaper flower of a similar colour and is sometimes sold in its place. If it is cheap, it is not saffron.

Out of the Spice Bazaar’s main gate is Eminönü: the ferry piers, the Galata Bridge and the mouth of the Golden Horn, where the city from the water begins.

A carpet, and its papers

Start with what you are looking at. A halı is knotted: each knot is tied round the threads of the warp and cut, and together the cut ends make the pile. Most Anatolian carpets use the symmetrical knot that the trade calls the Turkish knot. A kilim is flat-woven, with no pile at all. The pile is usually wool, on a foundation of wool or cotton; silk is finer, and dearer.

Yarn dyed by hand in small batches, with madder for red and indigo for blue, shifts a little in shade across a carpet. The trade calls it abrash, from the Turkish abraş, piebald, and it is not a fault. Turn the carpet over: on a hand-knotted one the pattern can be read on the back, knot by knot, and the fringe is the end of the warp it was woven on.

Then buy slowly. See many before choosing one, sit down, and accept the tea, which commits you to nothing. Buy what you would be glad to own at a price you would pay anyway, and ask for a written invoice that gives the carpet’s origin, age and materials.

Age matters for more than the price. Some old carpets count as cultural property, which may be sold within Türkiye but not taken out of it, and the museums of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism decide which. For anything that looks old, have the museum’s clearance in writing before you pay, not at the airport. If the carpet is to be shipped, have the shipping in writing too. Visitors who live abroad can reclaim the VAT on what they carry home, when they buy at shops authorised to offer it; the form is stamped by customs as they leave.

If you go

When

A weekday morning. The Grand Bazaar is closed on Sundays and at the bayrams (check which days); the Spice Bazaar opens on Sundays.

Getting there

The T1 tram to Beyazıt–Kapalıçarşı. The walk runs downhill and ends at Eminönü, on the same line.

How long

A morning, from the Beyazıt gate to the water at Eminönü, with lunch on the way down.

With us

Turkish coffee, the old way, roasted that morning and ground by hand, at a table in an old Istanbul house.