The Grand Bazaar (Kapalıçarşı) in Istanbul is one of the world’s most famous shopping destinations and, at 30,700 square meters, the world’s biggest enclosed bazaar. Once inside, the Bazaar’s 64 streets and smaller alleyways house roughly 4,000 stores and the mosque, post office, cafes, banks, and police station, making it a little central city.

Grand Bazaar is a place that keeps lots of vanishing professions alive with their unique culture. It is the world’s oldest, the biggest bazaar where the most variable products are exhibited. The bazaar includes more than 3 thousand shops and it is visited by approximately 400 thousand people. During the Ottoman Empire era, jewelry and precious hand-woven textiles were gathered in Grand Bazaar from all over the country to be sold, and it is a shopping paradise for the ones who especially appreciate traditional textiles and authentic jewelry.

Oktay Ekinci, former President of the Chamber of Architects, says that “Visiting Grand Bazaar is not just seeing a historical and mysterious place; it is the attractiveness created by the market tradition deriving from the past and by the human warmth intermingled with that, and even the feeling of trust.” When you travel to Istanbul, seeing Grand Bazaar is a must-do. If you want to find someone that will help you find easily what you are looking for in this huge place, teach you how to bargain, inform you about its history and deal with your transportation there are many guided tours too.

A closed box: the Grand Bazaar

The Grand Bazaar is one of the largest and oldest covered markets in the world in Istanbul, Turkey. To enjoy Istanbul fully, one should definitely lose oneself in the city, an...

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