Ninety seconds on Grand Bazaar
Leave the main streets for the hans behind them, where smiths work round quiet courtyards; come at opening and the bazaar is still calm enough to do it.
The main streets are all jewellers and lamp sellers. Turn off them into the hans, the old courtyard inns behind the shopfronts, where goldsmiths and silversmiths work at their benches and rarely mind a polite photograph.
Along Kuyumcular Caddesi, the jewellers' street, the two-floor Zincirli Han has workshops round a quiet courtyard and a café where you can sit over a glass of tea.
Bargain for almost everything, gold and silver included. Open at around half the asking price and expect to settle between half and two thirds of it; if you walk away and the seller lets you go, you went too low. Accepting tea does not commit you to buy.
Explore the rest of Istanbul
Two continents meet at the Bosphorus here, and the city is still organised around the water that made it. The headline monuments stand…
Built in 537 CE under Byzantine Emperor Justinian, this massive domed structure served as a cathedral, mosque, and museum before becoming a…
Silk cocoons were traded for centuries in the arcaded hans of the first Ottoman capital, a city spread along the foot of Uludağ. Its early…