On the Shores of the Mediterranean (23 page)

With the exception of a few narrow streets at the western end of the Bazaar, which run from north-west to south-east downhill from Yorgançilar Caddesi, the Street of the Quilt-makers, and the Street of the Fez-makers, Fesçilar Caddesi, which runs north-east/south-west, the remainder are aligned almost at right angles to one another on a simple north/south east/west grid. The main street is the Kalpakçilar Caddesi, the Street of the Calpac-makers (a
calpac
being a sort of felt or fur cap), which runs downhill the length of the south side of the Bazaar from the Beyazit Mosque
to the Nuruosmaniye Mosque. Taking this street as a base line, everything in the Bazaar, with the exception of the Furriers’ Bazaar in the south-east corner, the principal street of which is Kurkçuler Çarşisi, where the best sheepskins and furs are to be found, lies to the north of it.

The Gate of the Fez-makers, the Fesçilar Kapisi, is at the southwest, top corner of the Bazaar, next to the western portal, the Kalpakçilar Kapisi, near the Beyazit Mosque. From it and several adjacent gates – altogether there are eighteen iron doors to the Bazaar, all of them closed at night – its streets and alleys cascade away in the direction of the Golden Horn, like tributaries on a vast map of some continental river system.

I set off, travelling north-eastwards down the Street of the Fez-makers. Apertures in the high, vaulted roof, which are covered with iron bars, admitted a subdued light, ‘much in favour of the sellers of soiled or inferior goods’, as Murray’s
Handbook for Travellers in Constantinople
, 1908, puts it.

It so happens that this part of the Bazaar, especially around Puskülcüler Sokak, the now tassel-less Alley of the Tassel-makers, is one in which more inferior and second-hand garments are sold than any other and now they are seen to even less advantage with the aid of the new-fangled electric light. This is probably one of the reasons why a lot of this gear is hove aloft on halliards, high up under the roof and out of sight.

Nevertheless, however discussable the quality of the merchandise, the Great Bazaar provides a splendidly oriental setting for it (although the Spice Bazaar down by the Yeni Mosque at the Galata Bridge is architecturally far more distinguished), whether it is an Afghan-type sheepskin jacket which has fallen off its halliard several times and been trampled underfoot; an artificial silk prayer carpet made in Belgium, which will always remain as worthless as the day it was bought; a set of plated toothpicks
imported from Solingen or a trove of old coins still warm from some local mint.

In such a setting, however, what is good is irresistible, such as the embroidered silk harem clothes which an elderly Greek used to sell in a tiny booth on the periphery of the Bazaar, for between £10 and £50 ($14–70), many of them made in the eighteenth century. ‘Used to sell’ because his booth is now, alas, no more and neither, I suspect, is he. But there are still multi-coloured gloves from Erzurum, socks knitted by nomads that one day soon will be museum pieces, long-haired Angora goat-hair rugs, exotic velvets from Bursa and the tough materials worn by shepherds in Anatolia, as well as carpets and kilim rugs, to name a few of the articles that are worthwhile acquiring, that is if anything is worth burdening oneself with while travelling.

I grew fond of the Bazaar during the week I spent in it. In spite of the sometimes really appalling noise it is highly organized, the confusion only in the eye of the superficial observer. Above all it is, undoubtedly, mysterious.

‘I have lived eighty years in Istanbul and I do not know the city,’ one venerable carpet-seller in Sahaflar Caddesi, the Street of the Booksellers in the middle of the Bazaar, not to be confused with the Book Market outside, told me. ‘I have spent seventy-three of them in the Bazaar and I do not know it either.’

I like the merchants, living in a perpetual gloaming and thinking about nothing else but money, in spite of their gad-fly characteristics, with their perennial optimism and simple view of the world – that all will be well with it if only the rest of us continue to buy things we didn’t know we needed.

Then and there, in the Street of the Fez-makers, all fifty-two of the shop-owners gave me a great welcome, although it was now noon and those who were Muslims should have been at prayer, either on the floors of their shops or in one of the little oratories
in which the Bazaar abounds. They emerged from their shops, most of which are about the size of a normal wardrobe, to draw my attention to the merits of their radios, shiny black leather jackets of the sort worn by Balkan assassins working outside the Balkans, suedes and sheepskins and plastic shoes. There was not a Fez-maker in sight.

‘Sir, Sir! How are you? Are you well?’

This is one of the things I like about the Bazaar. No tradesman on Oxford Street or Broadway would ever ask me such a question, even if I’d just had a leg off. In 1908, according to Murray’s guide, the merchants used to address all male visitors, irrespective of nationality, as ‘Captain’.

‘I’m hungry.’

‘Sir, you want leather?’

‘No, I want kebabs.’

‘Sir, for you we have leather kebabs.’

And he handed me an over-size visiting card on which was printed ‘Leather and Sued germente for Ladies and Gentlemen’, having first inscribed a cross on the back of it with his ballpoint pen.

‘Why do you make a cross on the back of the card?’ I asked him. ‘Everyone in the Bazaar does it.’

‘Sir, you know some hippie guys before we gave some cards like that. They went to their country and at border write something on wrong price. We do it for you. Now nobody can try anything.’

The dreaded Alley of the Tassel-makers is as full of fur as a surrealist tea-cup; but mercifully it is only about fifty yards long and it leads into Keseçilar Caddesi, the now sheathless Street of the Sheath-makers, which is full of settees upholstered in liverish-looking velvet and sideboards that look as if they have been sprayed with chocolate mousse. Not even the most optimistic merchant
offered me one of those; but one of them tried to interest me in a bearskin from the earthquake-ridden Palandoken Mountains in the John Buchan-Greenmantle country above Erzurum, starting to bargain at around 30,000 TL.

I cantered on down the Street of the Sheath-makers, past a beautiful marble fountain with a crescent on top of it. It stands at the junction with Takkeçilar Caddesi, the Street of the Prayer Cap (or Linen Cap)-makers, which is solid with carpet-sellers, and as I flashed past one of them shouted ‘You want flying carpet?’

An American store buyer was having a working lunch with her agent at a table outside one of the three best eating places in the Bazaar, since closed. I knew he was an agent just as I knew she was a store buyer because she had a gold-plated Cross pencil, a diary from Hermès and a sort of mini-Gladstone bag from Louis Vuitton, and because I have been a store buyer myself; but this is the first time I have ever seen a big store buyer eating
paça
, sheep’s feet soup, which is delicious, while manipulating a Hewlett Packard calculator with the other hand.

The history of the Covered Bazaar has been one of almost unparalleled disaster. Together with the rest of the city, it has been burned down innumerable times, besides being shattered by an earthquake in 1894. In the sixty-eight years between 1633 and 1701 there were twenty-two major conflagrations. These were largely due to the Turkish habit of smoking in bed, neglecting to snuff candles, carrying hot coals with pincers from one room to another in their wooden houses, scattering them all over the place, drying their washing over the flames on wooden frames, engaging in huge fry-ups with oil during what is known as the Egg-Plant Summer (the equivalent of our Indian Summer) and engaging in plain, simple arson.

At least three of these major outbreaks destroyed large parts of the Eski Bedesten and the Sandal Bedesten, the latter, until the
middle of the last century when European competition wiped it out, being the centre of the trade in rare silks which was conducted there by the Armenians. Like its namesake, the Eski Bedesten, it was originally built of wood in the reign of Mehmed II, the Conqueror, not long after he took the city in 1453. Rebuilt in stone, as was the Eski Bedesten after 1701, it is a huge vaulted building of almost Piranesian grandeur used for auctions of carpets and other valuables at 1 p.m. on Mondays and Thursdays. Here, sitting on one of the curved wooden benches, you can pit yourself against Turkish and Armenian dealers, starting to buy carpets from around £100 ($140) a throw. The last great fire, which destroyed practically the whole Bazaar, except the two Bedestens, was in 1954. It raged for nearly three days.

Gloria Falkenheim left. She had a label on her bag giving her name and address way out in the far west and her zip code – this is not her real name, as she might not want other buyers to know she was there, but it is very similar. All through lunch men had been passing bent double under the appalling weight of dozens of carpets, huge wooden chests that look as if they might contain Volkswagens, newly painted sofas, things like that.

These men are the
hamals
, porters, by origin most of them shepherds from the wilds of Anatolia. There are about two hundred of them. With the aid of a
semer
, a sort of back pad, they can carry up to 220 lbs. They live long, men of eighty being seen carrying weights between 130 and 150 lbs, and they are paid very well by Turkish standards, whether they are carrying anything or not. When it snows they wrap rags around their shoes to avoid slipping on the steep cobbled streets of the city.

On the way to the Eski Bedesten I visited the police station. According to one of the officers there, and what he says is corroborated by the merchants, there is very little crime in the Bazaar. At the most two or three cases of pocket picking a year. Here, in the
Bazaar, the merchants are extremely sharp-eyed. As one said, ‘If there are people about with money, it is we who want it.’

Most of the crime, again according to the police, is fabricated. What they and the merchants still refer to, for want of a more modern epithet, as ‘hippies’ report the theft of tape recorders and cameras, having sold them at a good price, and then ask for a certificate declaring that they have been stolen. When they are back home they collect the insurance. Hippie-type tourists, collectively, are not popular in the Bazaar, principally because they never release any money if they can help it. In revenge, when they do decide to buy a sheepskin coat, for instance, the merchants try to sell them bum sheepskin coats at the highest prices they can extract from them.

The Eski Bedesten is a fantastic concentration of shops selling gold, precious stones, silver, copper and brass, carpets, antiques and onyx in an area approximately 160 feet by 230, sealed off from the rest of the Bazaar by four gates. Over one of them is a stone slab with a bas-relief of a single-headed Byzantine eagle on it. Inside I spent some time with Albert Sirazi, a young man in onyx ornaments. The raw material comes from Asia Minor. His grandfather was Persian, his mother Syrian Orthodox. He described himself as ‘100 per cent Turk’. His father, a watchmaker, paid the equivalent of £200 ($280) for the premises, virtually a small box plus show-cases which would fit four people comfortably around the hips. Now it is worth a lot of money, perhaps between a hundred and a hundred and fifty times as much, but it is not for sale, though business is terrible this winter, he says, the worst ever, and the worst of all, as it always is when things are bad, is onyx.

I can believe it. Onyx is horribly heavy and even more unrewarding to look at after it has been worked on than in its natural state.

‘Jewellery is good business,’ Albert said. ‘Small stuff. Women can pass it through the custom. Leather? Things are bad in leather. Leather is good buy but no profit for seller. In all the world there is leather. You don’t have to come to Istanbul for leather. Sheepskin coats 500 lira say and no business. Five people to keep and
hamals
, etc. Rents very high in the Bazaar. Business never so bad …’

‘What about carpets?’

‘Carpets are OK. Make good money. Antiques, too, pretty OK. Both have winter customers. Serious customers only come in winter. In onyx we wait for summer. In summer I make good business. Then I don’t have time to eat.’

A few doors up there is an antique dealer with whom I have already passed the time of day, on this and many other occasions. He sells beautiful, plaited silver belts – old Ottoman work – and Armenian and Russian silver cigarette cases, decorated with what is called
savat
. They look as if the black embellishments, pictures of mosques, sometimes replicas of envelopes franked ‘Van, 1914’, are printed on them. Kitsch really, they are still good buys out in Anatolia at around £70–80 ($98–112). Here in the Bazaar a first-class one (many of them are damaged and have been clumsily repaired) costs £150 ($210). Back in 1975 the £150 ones were around £50 ($70). In 1964 the ones that were £50 in 1975 were £5 or less.

‘How do you get your merchandise?’ I asked him.

‘We send buyers into Anatolia and they stop in the villages and shout and the peasants come out and trade whatever they have to sell, old silver, or copper, or carpets, for wheat, or money, or new things.’

‘How’s business? Any customers?’

‘Only one today; but I made a good export. You want a glass of tea?’

A small boy appears swinging a circular tray with two glasses
of scalding hot tea on it, brought from one of the nearby tea houses which are often no more than a hole in the wall.

This man had a number of ikons, most of them nineteenth century – ‘OK for covering walls’. He had one good example from the end of the seventeenth century for which he wanted £1000 ($1400) as a rock-bottom price. It had an official certificate on the back authorizing its export.