Sahaflar Çarşısı (Booksellers' Market)

Market · BeyazıtIstanbul, Turkey

Sahaflar Çarşısı kept trading books for centuries before anyone here was permitted to print one. Set in a small courtyard between the Grand Bazaar and Beyazıt Mosque, this booksellers' market descends from the Ottoman guild of sahaf — dealers in second-hand and rare volumes — heirs to a book trade the city has carried since Byzantine times. For generations everything on their shelves was handwritten, since printing in Arabic script was long resisted; it was İbrahim Müteferrika who opened the first Ottoman Turkish press in the 1720s, and his bust now watches over the trade he changed. You step off the bazaar's roar into a quieter, tree-shaded square where stalls open onto narrow aisles stacked to the ceiling, and the air turns to old paper and glue. Today the tables lean toward university textbooks, Qur'ans, prints and calligraphy, tourist editions and the occasional antiquarian find — Istanbul University's monumental gate stands just across Beyazıt Square, and students still browse here between classes. The market is small enough to walk in minutes, yet it rewards the patient browser who works slowly along the stacks.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The good material hides in folders — engravings, old maps and loose calligraphy panels are usually kept flat behind the counter, not out on the tables, so ask to see them.
Learn the tells of a real old book — much on the tables is fresh tourist editions and course books; the genuine antiquarian volumes give themselves away by foxed, softened paper, worn leather and hand-marbled endpapers.
Walk the whole ring before you buy — stalls quietly specialize, one strong on maps and engravings, another on Qur'ans, another on calligraphy, so the thing you want may sit three doors from the first table you stop at.
Autumn belongs to the students — around the start of the university term the textbook tables multiply and the aisles fill, while summer leaves it sleepier and easier to browse.

Things to do

1
Find the man on the pedestal
Look for the bronze bust standing among the stalls in the courtyard — İbrahim Müteferrika. Stand beside it and read the plaque, then look up at the stacks around you and picture the yard when every volume for sale was copied out by a human hand, one page at a time.
2
Cross the threshold and listen
Enter from the side facing the Grand Bazaar's Fesçiler Gate and stop the moment the passage opens into the courtyard. Notice the sound drop away — the shouting and the crowds thin into shade, footsteps and paper. It is the fastest way to feel how different this pocket is from the bazaar around it.
3
Open a book to its first page
Pull a battered second-hand volume off a stack and turn straight past the cover to the flyleaf. Look for an inked name, a date, a dedication or a faded stamp. In a market this old you are often holding a book that has already belonged to three or four strangers before you.