Nisantasi is the district Istanbul dresses in. International houses, Turkish designers and the city’s older jewellers share a few blocks around Abdi Ipekci Street, and the pavements are wide enough to make window shopping pleasant. It is not only shops. The area holds some of the better patisseries and coffee houses in the city, and […]

The streets between the Karakoy ferry terminal and Galata hold most of Istanbul’s independent design studios. Ceramics, jewellery, leather goods, stationery and small clothing labels sit in what were, until fairly recently, ship chandlers and hardware stores. Prices are fixed, cards are taken everywhere, and in many shops the person behind the counter made what […]

Galataport is the stretch of Bosphorus shoreline between Karakoy and Tophane that was returned to public use when the cruise terminal was moved underground. About 1.5 kilometres of promenade now runs where the docks used to be. Along it are waterfront restaurants, a shopping level and Istanbul Modern, the contemporary art museum, in a new […]

Serdar-i Ekrem Street runs from the foot of the Galata Tower down towards Karakoy, and over the past decade it has become the address for independent Turkish fashion. The buildings are late Ottoman apartment blocks with tall windows, which is part of why designers took the ground floors. The shops are small and mostly single-label: […]

Cukurcuma is the antique quarter of Beyoglu, and at under two hundred metres from the hotel it is effectively the neighbourhood next door. The streets are steep and narrow, and the shops occupy the ground floors of nineteenth-century apartment buildings. What is sold here is genuinely mixed: Ottoman furniture, brass and copper, old photographs, film […]

The Grand Bazaar began in 1461 as two stone warehouses ordered by Mehmed II and grew outward from there. Today it is a covered grid of sixty-one streets holding roughly four thousand shops, still organised by trade the way it was six centuries ago. The logic is worth knowing before you go in. Kalpakçılar Caddesi, […]

The Egyptian Bazaar opened in 1664 as part of the New Mosque complex, funded by customs duties on goods arriving from Cairo — which is where the name comes from, not from what is sold inside. The L-shaped hall holds about eighty-five shops. Spices and dried fruit still dominate, along with Turkish delight, tea, nuts […]

Arasta Bazaar is a single street of about seventy shops running along the eastern side of the Blue Mosque. It was built in the seventeenth century as part of the mosque’s endowment: the rents paid for the mosque’s upkeep, and to a degree they still do. Because it is small and the shops are permanent, […]

İstinye Park opened in 2007 in the Sarıyer district and is where Istanbul goes for luxury retail. Around three hundred stores, with a section of international houses — Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci, Dior — that has no equivalent elsewhere in the city. The design is unusual for a mall: a glass-roofed central court and an […]

Forum Istanbul in Bayrampaşa is less a shopping centre than a complex of attractions with shops attached: around 250 stores, plus an aquarium, a Madame Tussauds, a snow park and a cinema. Turkuazoo is the draw. It was Turkey’s first public aquarium, and its main tunnel runs through a tank holding sharks and rays. Combined […]

Cevahir opened in 2005 on Büyükdere Avenue in Şişli and held the title of Europe’s largest shopping centre by leasable area for several years. Six floors, around three hundred and forty shops, and a glass roof carrying what is claimed to be the world’s largest clock face. The tenant mix is mid-market rather than luxury […]