สถานที่เมอร์กาโตMerkatoመርካቶ

The market is a product of occupation policy. Addis Ababa's older market stood near St George's Church, where the City Hall is now; the Italian occupiers of the 1930s moved it west, to land around the premises of Fitawrari Habte Giyorgis Dinagde, and kept the old site — renamed Piazza, with European-style shop windows — for Europeans. The Arab traders of Piazza moved half a mile west after them; local shopkeepers displaced those traders in turn, and since the 1960s Merkato has been a mostly local market. It grew without a plan.

This record has to state a gap rather than fill it. The Ethiopian protective object in this atlas is the talismanic scroll — the ketab, written in Ge'ez on hide — and it is not a market good. A scroll is commissioned by the patient from a dabtara, an unordained figure in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, who cuts it to the patient's own measure: to the height of the body for head-to-toe protection, longer to hang on a wall. The making includes a sacrifice of the animal whose hide is used, standing for the person the scroll is for. Activation needs a third party literate in Ge'ez to read it aloud.

Inference — that is why a market this size is thin in this atlas. A commissioned object made to a body's measurements does not have a stall. This project searched for a published source placing the scroll trade inside Merkato and found none it could cite; the record says so instead of inventing an aisle.

Trading, as Africa's largest open-air market. It is not primarily a tourist market: most sections are wholesale. No day is marked open or closed below.