The Grand Bazaar and the Spice Bazaar, İstanbul's two historic markets, were both founded to keep a mosque running. The Grand Bazaar dates from 1461 and was built to earn an income for Hagia Sophia; the Spice Bazaar went up between 1660 and 1664 as the arasta, the market street, of the Yeni Cami. The first is in the Çemberlitaş quarter, with the baroque Nuruosmaniye Mosque at its entrance; the second is on Eminönü square, beside the Yeni Cami, where the Galata Bridge comes ashore. Between them lies the Mahmud Paşa quarter, whose mosque courtyard has a Nuruosmaniye side and whose founder's tomb stands near Eminönü, so a walk from one bazaar to the other can take in a fifteenth-century han, one of the city's oldest baths and some of its rarest tiles.
The Grand Bazaar: a market built for a mosque
The bazaar makes sense once you know the vakıf system behind it. An Ottoman mosque paid for its repairs and upkeep from a separate building that brought in money, and a market was the most valuable building of that kind. This one was raised among the works meant to support Ayasofya in the reign of Mehmed the Conqueror, and it kept growing, piece by piece, for centuries afterwards.
In time the whole region's trade turned on it. İstanbul's richest merchants worked here, precious stones and ornaments from every direction changed hands, and for a while the bazaar did much of the work of a bank and an exchange.
The ministry ranks it among the oldest and biggest places to shop anywhere. It spreads over 45,000 square metres with 3,600 shops, and it was bigger still in Ottoman times. Expect carpets, bags, fabrics, gold and silver, antiques, tiles and souvenirs, some of it Ottoman in origin and some entirely new, and do not plan to see all of it: a full day of walking is not enough. The trade spills out into the surrounding streets, the Nur-u Osmaniye side among them.
Nuruosmaniye: the baroque mosque at the gate
The Nuruosmaniye Mosque, built between 1748 and 1755, was the first in İstanbul in the baroque manner, and its complex is counted a turning point in Ottoman building. Mahmud I ordered it; Mustafa Ağa and his assistant Simeon Kalfa built it; and it was finished under Mahmud's brother Osman III, whose name it carries: Nur-u Osmani, the light of the Ottomans, a name said to refer both to the sultan and to the light inside.
That light comes through 174 plaster windows in five tiers. High marble stairs lead up to the prayer hall from two directions, and the single dome above it, twenty-six metres wide with thirty-two windows at its base, is among the largest used in an Ottoman mosque. Two details stand out: the ramp at the end of the eastern corridor, by which the sultan could ride into his gallery on horseback, and the stone caps of the minarets, the first time stone finials replaced lead on a mosque.
The Mahmud Paşa quarter: a han, a bath and a tiled tomb
Mahmud Paşa was grand vizier to Mehmed II, and the foundation he began here in the early 1460s once held a mosque, a tomb, a bath, a han and a medrese, among other buildings. His mosque, finished in 1463 by the inscription over its door, is among the oldest in İstanbul. In front of its mihrab stands his tomb of 1473, the one to see in this city for tiles: above the plain lower walls, the küfeki stone is cut away and turquoise and dark blue tiles fill the hollows, an inlay of the Seljuk kind that appears nowhere else in İstanbul.
Two more pieces of the foundation survive. The bath west of the mosque, dated 1466-67 over its door, is one of the oldest in İstanbul; only its men's half remains, and since the 1990s it has been a bazaar. The Kürkçü Han, built as Mahmud Paşa's han, has two storeys and two courtyards, and no other han from the fifteenth century survives.
Another han, at Tahtakale, belongs to the same story of trade. The Beta Yeni Han, open since 1554 and still working, is in the ministry's view the oldest coffeehouse known in the world. The han now houses a coffee museum.
The Spice Bazaar and the Yeni Cami
Turhan Sultan, mother of Mehmed IV, ordered the Spice Bazaar, and work began in 1660 under the chief court architect Kâzım Ağa; Mustafa Ağa, chief court architect by then, completed it in 1664. Seventeenth-century writers called it the New Bazaar or the Valide Bazaar. Because it was built with revenues from Egypt, and most of its goods and spices came from there, people began calling it the Egyptian Bazaar in the middle of the eighteenth century.
At first its six gates divided it between two trades: cotton dealers worked by the Haseki, Çiçek Pazarı and Yeni Cami gates, and herbalists by the Ketenciler, Hasırcılar and Balık Pazarı gates. Over the main gates at either end sat the commercial courts that settled disputes between tradesmen and with their customers. Each shop had a wooden bench in front and a store behind, and some hung a sign under the eaves to be recognised by: a boat, a tassel, a pair of scissors, an ostrich egg, a fire tower.
Twice burned, the bazaar was restored in 1940–43 and in 2015–18. A road cut across the Yeni Cami courtyard in 1941 left the mosque and its market apart. The shops sell mostly spices and Turkish delight, with jewellery and gifts beside them.
Within the Yeni Cami complex, three tombs stand together: the tomb of Hatice Turhan Valide Sultan, dated 1663; the Havatin, which began as a room for reciting the Qur'an and became a burial place for the women of the dynasty; and the Cedid Havatin, added to the north in the nineteenth century. Eighty-two members of the Ottoman house lie in the three. From Eminönü the tram crosses the Galata Bridge, a bascule bridge 490 metres long, and ferries leave from the piers at its foot for Üsküdar, Kadıköy, the Bosphorus and the Islands.
Süleymaniye and Beyazıt: two great complexes to add
Of the two conservation areas of the World Heritage listing that lie on the hills above the Golden Horn, one surrounds the Süleymaniye Mosque, raised by Sinan between 1551 and 1558 on Süleyman the Magnificent's order. Its main dome is 27.25 metres across, and 238 windows light a hall 59 metres long and 58 wide. Above the mihrab, coloured glass by a master called İbrahim lets in a light Sinan compared to the wings of Gabriel, and he likened the four great granite columns to the four caliphs. The four minarets, with ten balconies between them, are read as numbers: Süleyman was the fourth sultan to reign since the conquest and the tenth of his dynasty.
Behind the mihrab wall, Süleyman and Hürrem Sultan lie in two tombs in a garden of eleven gates. Sinan, who held the post of chief imperial architect from 1538 for forty-nine years, designed his own tomb at the corner of the complex: an open dome on six columns, kept deliberately modest.
Bayezid II's mosque on Beyazıt Square, begun in 1500 and finished in 1505, was, after Mehmed II's own, the second great complex built as the Ottomans remade the city. Two of its buildings are now museums. The Havuzlu Medrese, named for the pool by its entrance, holds the Museum of Turkish Calligraphic Art, with 3,638 works and the cover of the Kaaba door dated 1884. The double bath given to the public by Gülbahar Hatun now houses the Turkish Bath Culture Museum. In the Beyazıt quarter, on the central campus of İstanbul University, the Beyazıt Tower was put up to watch for fires, and for a long time its coloured lights forecast tomorrow's weather for the city, red meaning snow and blue a clear sky.
