If the southeastern city of Şanlıurfa, is an open-air museum, its çarşı or bazaar is its living, working centrepiece. While Urfa’s religious and secular monuments stand ready to be admired, the çarşı is its hands-on exhibition. The walls may be dated to at most a few hundred years, but the exchange of goods and words and symbols which goes on within them is both timeless and new: the product of time and culture, the present fleeting form of the unbroken reproduction of millennia. Colourful carpets and rugs are displayed without discord alongside the most developed electronic apparatus, copper boilers, Adıyaman tobacco . Western fabrications and Far Eastern fabrics are bought and sold simultaneously.
First-time visitors find themselves in a labyrinth with many doors but no way out – or a film set with entrances and exits on all sides. The market zone is not to be explored easily or in haste; instead, you must wander lost from hall to hall and arch to arch, to become familiar with the many routes - the many ways to earn a living.
