Turkey: The Spice Bazaar in Istanbul

Entering the Spice Bazaar today is still a dramatic experience. With little transition from the street to the entrance, which is festooned with the gaudy displays of the newspaper- and magazine-sellers, one leaves behind the bustle and the often inclement weather of the outside world—heat and dust in the summer, rain and mud in the winter—to be enveloped immediately in a vast, dimly lit realm redolent with hundreds of scents. Apart from the often dazzling electric lights that highlight the displays in each shop, light is provided only by glass-covered apertures high in the vaulted ceiling that arches over the market. On each side of a walkway broad enough to take two lanes of traffic stand hundreds of shops offering the most varied kinds of foodstuffs. The Spice Bazaar is in fact like a permanent exhibition of Turkish foodstuffs. Here you will find not only every type of spice both familiar and unfamiliar but also dried roots and barks used for medicinal purposes; a great variety of cheeses; sucuk and pastırma; honey, both in jars and honeycomb; black and green olives; almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, and pistachios; dried fruit and herbs; rice and other grains; clarified butter; rosewater and bergamot oil; and a host of other items the precise nature and use of which are a mystery to the uninitiated.