Grand Bazaar Jewellery Lanes

The Grand Bazaar — Kapalıçarşı, the "Covered Market" — is one of the oldest and largest covered markets in the world, and it has been a gold-and-jewellery market from the very beginning. Its historic heart was literally a "Bedesten of Gems": precious goods were the founding trade.

Mehmed the Conqueror had it built soon after the 1453 fall of Constantinople — construction began in the winter of 1455–56 and the core structure was finished by 1460–61. It grew around two great vaulted halls into the labyrinth of today by the early 1600s, surviving a long history of fires and the 1894 earthquake.

The jewellery geography is still legible. The Cevahir Bedesten — the İç, or Inner, Bedesten — is the secure vaulted core, 44 windowless cellars where the most precious wares were kept and where jewellers, armourers, and crystal dealers traded. Today the gold and jewellery trade concentrates along Kalpakçılar Caddesi, the bazaar's "gold jewellers' road."

It remains overwhelming in scale: 61 covered streets, some 4,000 shops, and 18 gates, drawing between a quarter and four hundred thousand visitors a day. Gold is often sold by weight against the daily rate, the trade still runs on guilds and haggling, and — as it always has — the most precious pieces stay in the cabinets until you ask.