Timeless Life in the Grand Bazaar: The Rise and Fall of Turkey’s Marketplace

At some point after living in Istanbul for many years, I came to find it strange that every time there was a financial crisis in the country, foreign newspapers dispatched a reporter to the Grand Bazaar to interview shopkeepers and idling shoppers about the state of their wallets. What did this bazaar, this 550-year-old Ottoman shopping mall sagging beneath its own history, located in between tired touristic bauble shops and bad köfte restaurants in the old city of Istanbul, possibly have to tell us about Turkey in the twenty-first century? Turkey’s cities have also expanded tenfold—Istanbul is roughly four times London’s physical size—and bazaars and pedestrianized shopping streets now serve every neighborhood, each of them microcities with their own microeconomies, their own bakkal (corner shop) and manav (greengrocer) and kasap (butcher), which are as faithfully patronized as they would have been a century ago.

Source: www.laphamsquarterly.org