A book market

The Beyazit Mosque was hidden under scaffolding: more repair work. We went around it, and there, opposite the library, just behind the mosque was Sahaflar Çarşısı. The name means antique market. Does the name refer to the second hand books here, or to the fact that it was reputedly a book market since the Byzantine times? I couldn’t figure that out. The courtyard was a pleasant place to stroll through. Although I read no Turkish, I love to look at books while trying to figure out who buys them.

The Istanbul university occupies the whole area between the Beyazit and Sulemaniye mosques. So most of the people who pass through this lovely arched gate are probably students; there did seem to be an enormous number of textbooks. But there were some who were looking at the books without picking up a single one; probably tourists like us. One gate of the bazaar opens up to the University, but the other stands just outside the Grand bazaar. In any case, it no longer seems to be the haunt of novelists and antiquarians that it was in the early twentieth century.

The fountains and the structures here are not very old. I’d read about a fire here some time in the 1950s, so all this would have been built after that; even the rococo-looking water fountain near the gate. There was a bust on one side which neither The Family nor I remembered to take a photo of. This was of Ibrahim Muteferrika, an Ottoman diplomat, who published the first Turkish book in 1729, a two-volume Arabic-Turkish dictionary.

Stacks of books lay around on the warm stone paving. From what I’d read, there wasn’t a single market place for books in the early Ottoman times. Some shops in this Sahaflar bazaar and several in the Grand bazaar next door would deal in books and manuscripts. They were moved here in the late Ottoman times, perhaps at the beginning of the 20th or the end of the 19th century. The line of Marvel comics here showed a recent interest in the American superhero, probably due to the movies, which have been as big in Turkey as in the rest of the world.

The interest in Tintin and the other French and Belgian comics is much older. Orhan Pamuk, in his book Istanbul, writes “When the first Tintin film was made in Istanbul, a pirate publishing outfit issued a black-and-white comic book called Tintin in Istanbul, the creation of a local cartoonist who mixed his own renderings of various frames from the film with frames from various other Tintin adventures.” I casually flipped through these books. No luck with counterfeits, they were all the usual genuine articles.

Inside the Grand bazaar we’d seen several shops selling calligraphy and paintings, nice, but very ornately framed. Here I stopped at a shop which was clearly geared to the same tourist market (note the books on Turkish food in various foreign languages). I can barely read any Arabic, but one doesn’t need to in order to enjoy Arabic calligraphy. The Family and I lost ourselves in thumbing through the plates, and wondering about the pencils and brushes and inks to be used. We may have spent no more than half an hour in this place, but we carried away very pleasant memories.