A Bazaar Experience
Andrew Swafford
The diamond in the rough. It’s what I was searching for that day in Istanbul as I walked into the Grand Bazaar. I had a hundred Turkish lira (about seventy U.S. dollars) and was determined to make a deal. The Grand Bazaar is one of the oldest and largest covered markets in all of Turkey. Sprawling over several city blocks, it has just about everything a person could want (and much more that you don’t). The ‘stores’-- though more like stalls--are squeezed together on either side of the streets, leaving no surface unadorned with purchasable goods. You walk in and are immediately dazzled by displays of hundreds of hanging lamps, or faced with the thousands of jerseys, possibly even the sparkling displays of the jewelers. This, however, is not what I was looking for. I was on a search for treasure. That one object that is left glittering, exposed, in the lamplight after you rummage through a pile of junk. All of the streets in the bazaar are arranged by type--clothes, carpets, furs, lamps, jewels, trinkets, and antiques.
I was closing in on the antique streets, asking shop owners where I could find them. After six wrong turns, I ended up at a small archway and stairs leading down with a sign propped in the corner saying “Old Bazaar.” It wasn’t the antique section, and was hidden in between two flashy jewelry stalls . . . just what I was looking for. If traveling has taught me anything, it is to “trust your first reaction.” I could have kept looking for the antique section, but my first reaction to this entryway was complete rapture and enchantment. I knew I had made the right decision as I walked down the stairs into a smaller market with only a few stalls.
The shop owners in this bazaar were unlike any I have experienced in all of my shopping experiences. They were genuinely interested in me as a person, not just the money I had to spend at their stalls. I was invited to sit and have tea with two shopkeepers who wanted to hear stories of my hometown in California, and not once did they try to sell me anything. Perhaps it was because I was there late in the day, or by myself, but I would urge anyone shopping in the Grand Bazaar to treat the shopkeepers as real people--because they are. They all have families and stories to tell, likes and dislikes. Too often we treat attendants as information stops or automatons and never do we even ask the simple question, “How are you?”
After tea, I asked the two where I could find old things, as they had a shop of “genuine fake purses and watches” which was not of any interest to me. They directed me to a stall crammed into the corner of the old bazaar. I use the word crammed here to convey the absolute sprawl of goods that was piled in every corner, case, and shelf of this area. The owner was an old man from Istanbul who traveled extensively and brought back things to sell here. He knew every dagger, ring, pipe, candleholder and tin box among the multitudes of objects. Their origin ranged from Egypt to Syria, Lebanon, and India . . . and those were only the few articles I asked about. I finally found an old, ornate knife from India after an hour of patiently ransacking the shop.
Now the haggling begins. There are three very important things to haggling, especially in the bazaar. One, trust your instincts. Decide immediately after seeing the object what you will pay for it, and never pay more than this price. Two, do not be aggressive. The shopkeeper hates people who he feels are unreasonable and unwilling to bargain, so be nice and give his prices some thought before declining. Three. reassess, before asking how much the object is. Examine it closely and decide again if your first price is too high, that price is your target price. After this is done, you can ask the price and begin haggling.
Here is a small example for all of the bargain hunters traveling:
I walk into the shop and immediately smile and ask the shopkeeper how he is, where he is from, what his story is. We talk until he invites me to look around his shop and I question him on the histories of several pieces I’m not very interested in- and ask the price of a couple. I am sure to make the point that things are very expensive. I finally find the dagger and my gut reaction is that it is not worth more than fifty dollars U.S. I pick it up and examine it carefully, telling the shopkeeper I am interested in it as well as re-evaluating it. I find a crack in the wood and a chip missing from the bone inlay: I decide it is worth about thirty-five to forty dollars. Now I am ready to ask the price.
Doing all of this not only puts you in a good position for bargaining as the shopkeeper will over-quote the first price by less (since you have made a point that things are too expensive for you) but also gives the object a wonderful story if you do end up purchasing it. Not only do I now have an amazing bone-inlay knife from the oldest and largest bazaar in Turkey, I know from my conversation with the owner the history behind it. The knife was from a small farming village in India and had been passed down for generations and finally given to the shop owner as a gift from the man who admired the shop owner so much (I could not understand what deed or favor was done due to the language barrier) and having no children of his own, presented it to the shopkeeper. It also cost me thirty-eight dollars.
Never before in my life have I seen the splendor and diverse array of goods as in the Grand Bazaar. Any person traveling through Turkey should stop in Istanbul and, at the very least, talk to some of the interesting people who make a living in the labyrinthine streets of goods. Any person looking for that undiscovered treasure or unique story should wander around a bit until they find a small archway between two jewelry shops. Keep in mind as you walk down those stairs to trust your instincts and to talk to the people in that little market, as they have as much history as any of the fake purses or Indian knives they’ve collected on their travels.