by Recep Peker Tanıtkan
If the southeastern city of Şanlıurfa, is an open-air museum, its çarşı or bazaar is its living, working centrepiece. While Urfa’s religious and secular monuments stand ready to be admired, the çarşı is its hands-on exhibition. The walls may be dated to at most a few hundred years, but the exchange of goods and words and symbols which goes on within them is both timeless and new: the product of time and culture, the present fleeting form of the unbroken reproduction of millennia. Colourful carpets and rugs are displayed without discord alongside the most developed electronic apparatus, copper boilers, Adıyaman tobacco and smuggled tea. Western fabrications and Far Eastern fabrics are bought and sold simultaneously.
First-time visitors find themselves in a labyrinth with many doors but no way out – or a film set with entrances and exits on all sides. The market zone is not to be explored easily or in haste; instead, you must wander lost from hall to hall and arch to arch, to become familiar with the many routes - the many ways to earn a living.
Moments in history
The word bazaar – ‘pazar’ in Turkish - is thought to be Persian for a place of prices. More poetically, the Turkish word çarşı comes from two Persian words, meaning four streets or four ways. It refers to a four-sided market place, or to a street with shops to left and right. In the time of the famous ‘Seyahatname’ of the seventeenth-century traveller Evliya Çelebi, Urfa Bazaar had 400 shops selling every kind of valuable product. The saddlery was located on the shore of the İbrahim Halil River, Çelebi reports, and the two sides of the main thoroughfare were watered with cool water “like the ‘Serdab’ (underground room) of Baghdad” and adorned with flowers in season, brightening the hearts and minds of all who passed. There were, he adds, places where all erudite people gathered and rested.
Evliya Çelebi does not omit to mention the ‘bedesten’, the vaulted and fireproof part of the bazaar where the most valuable goods were kept. He writes of two bedesten, of which one was “an old-type structure with a dome made of stones and bricks, constructed endwise… It has three iron doors. All the precious jewellery is to be found here.” According to the annals of Aleppo Province, dated 1867 and 1883, however, there was a single ‘bedesten’ in the centre of Urfa. This is today’s Kazzaz Bazaar.
Commerce and coffee
The old commercial centre, which consists of inns and bazaars dating back to the Ottoman period, is concentrated around the Gümrük Inn. Besides the Kazzaz Bazaar, the Sipahi Bazaar, Koltukçu Bazaar, Pamukçu Bazaar, Oturakçı Bazaar, Kınacı Bazaar, Pıçakçı Bazaar, Kazancı Bazaar, Neccar Bazaar, İsotçu Bazaar, Demirci Bazaar, Çulcu Bazaar, Çadırcı Bazaar, Sarraç Bazaar, Attar Bazaar, Tenekeci Bazaar, Kürkçü Bazaar, Eskici Bazaar, Keçeci Bazaar, Kokacı (Kovacı) Bazaar, Kasap Bazaar, Boyahane ‘Çarşısı, Kavafhane Çarşısı, Hanönü Çarşısı and Hüseyniye Çarşısı - all assembled around the Gümrük Inn - retain their historical character.
Village women from Harran with tattoos on their faces and hands, Syrian tradesmen arriving via the Akçakale border gate, men with kefiye headdresses, university students walking hand-in-hand – all lend life and colour to the Bazaar. Outside, vans and motorcycles await business, while the tradesmen fasten their motorcycles and donkeys to the utility poles. Red peppers, aubergines and margarine mark out the windows of the kebap shops, where the cooking begins in the early hours of the morning, and the smell of meat and liver soon spreads everywhere and clings to everyone. Urfa’s coffee is boiled seven times in ewers and ‘gümgüm’ cans and drunk in little cups known as ‘mırra’.
Starting the day
The Sipahi Bazaar has a special place among Urfa’s markets. It was built 700 years ago, during the construction of the Gümrük Inn, for the horses of the cavalry soldiers who lodged at the inn. Today, carpets, kilims, furs and saddlebags are sold here, making it resemble a bright oil painting of many different colours, with the patterns of the carpets and rugs magically repeated in the architecture.
The Sipahi bazaar is surrounded by the Boyahane Bazaar, the İsotçu Bazaar and the bedesten, where weaving products are sold. Its mystic atmosphere is enhanced by the unique prayer ceremony with which the day begins. “Come on brothers, let’s pray”, declares the ‘dellalbaşı’ or chief broker, and the tradesmen gather to call up the good things and dispel the evil in their thick Urfa accents, after the manner of the ‘Ahi’ guilds of centuries past, which espoused generosity and bravery, and regarded every member as a brother.
The conversation trade
The trading too has a ceremonial flavour. People with hand-woven carpets, rugs or quilts to sell deliver them to the Sipahi Bazaar brokers along with their hopes and aspirations. Each deal involves the buyer, the seller, the broker and a guarantor. The goods go to the highest bidder and the broker is given his commission.
The brokers pace back and forth all day. The traders await customers, drink tea and make conversation. Conversation is perhaps the true business of the bazaar - and it costs only a simple greeting. Within no time at all, chairs are set out, mırra is served, and a little circle of people has formed to hear the story out.
(DIPLOMAT - November 2005 - Ankara)