The Spice Bazaar

The Mısır Çarşısı — the Egyptian Bazaar — built in the 1660s to fund the mosque next door, and still an L of about eighty shops under a painted vault. Smaller than the Grand Bazaar by an order of magnitude, and considerably more concentrated.

The Egyptian name is not because the goods came from Egypt but because the mosque it endowed — the New Mosque next door — was funded from the Cairo tax revenues. Both buildings were part of one charitable foundation, which is why they touch.

What it costs

Free to enter. The trade is spices, dried fruit, nuts, tea and lokum, and prices inside the hall are set for visitors — the streets immediately outside, where the city actually shops, are cheaper for the same goods.

When to go

Open on Sundays, unlike the Grand Bazaar, which makes it the answer when a Sunday plan collapses.

It is at its most photogenic in the late afternoon when the lamps are on and the vault glows.

Getting there

Eminönü: the T1 tram, or any of the ferries. The bazaar is right behind the New Mosque at the foot of the Galata Bridge, and you will smell it before you find the door.

If you only have an hour

Walk the full L, then go straight out of the far door into the streets behind — the hardware lanes, the coffee grinders, the cheese and pickle shops. That is where the market continues, and it is free of everything the hall has too much of.

Inside the hall, the shops worth your time are the ones with a queue of people carrying shopping bags rather than cameras. Turkish delight is worth buying from a shop that will let you taste it; the vacuum-packed boxes stacked by the door are not the same product.

What people get wrong

Buying saffron. What is sold cheaply in the hall as saffron is very often safflower, which is not the same thing and is worth a fraction of it.