สถานที่แกรนด์บาซาร์ (คาปาลึชาร์ชึ)The Grand BazaarKapalıçarşı

Mehmed II started it in the winter of 1455/56, months after taking Constantinople, with a building for textiles and jewels: the Cevahir Bedesten, the Bedesten of Gems, finished in the winter of 1460/61 and endowed to the waqf of Hagia Sophia. A second hall, the Sandal Bedesten, followed. Sellers filled the ground between them, and a quarter grew that did nothing but trade.

By the 17th century the shape was fixed: 67 named streets, 18 gates opened at dawn and shut at dusk, 3,000 shops plus 300 in the surrounding hans. Evliya Çelebi described it around 1638. Until the repairs that followed the 1894 earthquake there were no shops as western Europe knew them — a merchant sat on a wooden divan in a space six to eight feet wide and three to four feet deep, the precious stock kept in cabinets rather than displayed, and the day ended by drawing a drape across it.

The eye bead is the market's smallest export. In Turkey it is the nazar boncuğu; in Greece the same object is the máti. It is blue glass with white, black and yellow at the centre, a design whose written record and surviving examples run back to about 1500 BCE, and it is now, in the encyclopedia's flat phrase, a popular choice of souvenir with tourists.

Inference — a market that concentrated one trade per street for five centuries is the reason the bead has a fixed look at all. Mass production did not flatten this design; a guild had already fixed it.

Employs 26,000 people and takes between 250,000 and 400,000 visitors a day. Wikipedia's account, read on 16 September 2026, states the complex opens each day except Sundays and bank holidays, from 9:00 to 19:00. This project has not read that timetable on the bazaar's own page, so no day is marked open or closed below.