Sahaflar Çarşısı: The Booksellers' Bazaar
Why is it significant?
Duck through the low gateway and the roar of the bazaar drops away. You are in a small courtyard under a plane tree, lined with shops stacked to the ceiling with books: Ottoman manuscripts, faded atlases, university textbooks, and paperbacks in five alphabets.
Key Facts
| Place | Sahaflar Çarşısı: The Booksellers' Bazaar |
|---|---|
| Address | Beyazıt, Sahaflar Çarşısı, 34126 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.01050, 28.96600 |
| Part of Walk | Sinan's City: Istanbul from the Grand Bazaar to Süleymaniye |
| Generated | Generated |
Duck through the low gateway and the roar of the bazaar drops away. You are in a small courtyard under a plane tree, lined with shops stacked to the ceiling with books: Ottoman manuscripts, faded atlases, university textbooks, and paperbacks in five alphabets.
Sahaf is the Turkish word for a bookseller, and they have gathered beside the Beyazıt Mosque for centuries, close to the colleges and the scholars who were their customers. For most of Ottoman history, a book meant a manuscript, copied by hand by professional scribes. So the booksellers here were also dealers in calligraphy, in illumination, in bindings of tooled leather.
Now find the bust in the middle of the courtyard. It shows İbrahim Müteferrika, a Hungarian-born convert to Islam, who in 1727 received permission to open the first Ottoman printing press using Arabic letters. His first book, a dictionary, came out in 1729. There is a popular myth that the Ottomans simply banned printing. The truth is more interesting: presses printing in Hebrew, Armenian and Greek had worked in the city long before him, and Müteferrika's permit excluded religious texts, which remained the work of calligraphers.
He printed fewer than twenty titles, but what titles: histories, a geography with maps, a treatise on the reform of the army. His books are now prized collector's items, and a copy sometimes surfaces in a shop around this very courtyard. Think of it... the man who brought print to the empire, watching over a market of the very books he made possible.
The courtyard has another neighbour. Beyond that gateway on the far side rises the oldest surviving imperial mosque in Istanbul, and next to it a gate that has changed owners more often than any building on this walk. Walk through to the open square, and turn to face the great arch on its northern side.