The Grand Bazaar — Kapalıçarşı, the "covered market" — has traded on this spot since Sultan Mehmed II founded it just after the conquest of 1453. What began as a stone hall for jewels and cloth grew into a walled town of around sixty covered streets and some four thousand shops. It is still a working market, not a museum: about twenty-six thousand people earn their living inside, and whole lanes belong to a single trade — goldsmiths, carpets, lamps, ceramics and leather, each with a quarter of its own.
Getting lost is the point. You pass beneath painted vaults where tea trays sail by overhead, coppersmiths hammer out of sight, and daylight falls through high windows onto pyramids of lokum. At the centre sits the oldest part, the Cevahir Bedesten — a domed inner hall of antiques, old coins, amber beads and inlaid daggers.