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The Spice Bazaar of the city of Istanbul (Turkey),
called in Turkish as Mısır Çarşısı ("mısır" in Turkish has a double
meaning; Egypt and cereal) is one of the oldest bazaars in the city. It
is located in the Eminönü neighborhood. It is the second largest covered
bazaar after the Grand Bazaar.
There are different historical
sources that give an account of the origins of the name of the bazaar:
due to the existence of various spices from the East it was called
'Egyptian Bazaar', another version is that previously, in the Byzantine
period, there was abundant trade in cereals.
It was made between
1663 and 1664 by order of Sultan Turhan. It was designed by the chief of
the Koca court of architects Kasım Ağa, but completed by the architect
Mustafa in the year 1664. The bazaar is part of the Yeni Camii mosque
complex in addition to a line of shops, a cemetery, two fountains and a
school.
It is shaped like an "L" with the short side, measuring
120 meters, perpendicular to the mosque and the long side measuring 150
meters parallel to it. On the short side there are 46 shops, 23 on each
side and on the long side there are 36 shops, 18 on each side with
another six shops in the centre. A total of 88 stores.
Even before the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople
(1453), in the Byzantine Middle Ages, the entire surrounding district
was a quarter for traders from the Italian maritime republics
(Venetians, Pisans, Genoese and from Ancona and from Ragusa); Today's
Hasircilar Caddesi was the Venetians' shopping street. Jewish traders
also lived and sold nearby, in the Jewish quarter in front of the
“Jewish Gate”.
In his essay “Missir Tscharschi – At the Spice
Traders” from 1917, Friedrich Schrader describes the condition of the
spice bazaar at the end of the Ottoman period, when people there not
only stocked up on spices for cooking, but also on all sorts of
traditional medicinal and bathing herbs .
In 1998, an explosion occurred in the bazaar, fatally injuring seven people, including several children. The Turkish government assumed that the PKK had carried out a bomb attack and brought several charges against Pınar Selek, who was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment in January 2013. To this day, however, it is still disputed among court-appointed experts whether the explosion in the bazaar was actually the detonation of a bomb or an accident involving a gas container. After the incident, security checks were temporarily tightened at the entrance to the bazaar.
The L-shaped building located next to the New Mosque has six doors. One of these is the Haseki Gate. The part above it is two-storey, and the upper floor used to be a court, where the problems of the tradesmen and the public were solved.