The Grand Bazaar… One of the gateways of my family to the outside world during my childhood… Going to the Grand Bazaar was a form of wakening. Squadrons of women of all ages formed by the family and close friends, going to the Bazaar in a hurly-burly… And me, dragged along, going from one place to the other for hours and dying of fatique.
If I had'nt known that there is a reward at the end, I would have run away; but I could'nt face loosing that reward: sponge cake soaked in heavy syrup at Çukur Muhallebici with curdled cream on top. And the icing accumulating on its side; just unbelievable. Still one couldn't eat it all.

Grand Bazaar is one of the first buildings of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul. The first stage of the Bazaar was the building of the two bedestens: Bedestens of Sandal and Cevahir. Construction started just after the conquest (1453). The purpose: to collect funds for the upkeep of Church of St. Sophia which had been transformed into a mosque. The crowds that these buildings attracted soon after their completion formed the nuclei of an ever expanding bazaar.
At that time the Bazaar which today measures 300,000 square meters covered only a third of this area but as the empire grew and Istanbul developed as the empire's capital, the Bazaar's expansion became inevitable.
The area around the two bedestens were at first hastily built which changed to stone and brick constructions with wooden rooves which gave no protection to fire.
Till today the Grand Bazaar has seen dozens of fires. After the 1546, 1618, 1652 fires the worst was the fire of 1660. 1695 and 1701 were also years of fire.
Supposedly each fire should teach a lesson. Brick arcades replaced the wooden rooves but fires didn't come to an end. The fire of 1750 invited a new disaster to that date unknown: the Janisseries ransacked the Bazaar.
A third source of disaster were the eartquakes. The worst of the 12 known eartquakes since its foundation was the 1894 eartquake. This quake destroyed most of its domed arcades.
The reinforcement of its walls by steel columns during the reign of Abdulhamid the Second proved to be an intervention providing no additional security. This intervention however has paved the way to encouragement of adoptations at individual shops. Now, any dividing wall demolished, any enlargened frontage leads to important weaknesses against a possible earthquake.
The reconstruction after the great fire of 1954 finished in 1959. The Bazaar reopened the same year. Today, the two sides of the arcades are full of illuminated panels, which have no resemblance to the Bazaar's former architecture.
What hides behind this appearent distortion is that due to changes made in the construction, the buildings have weakened. Even if not so the fact still remains that the constructions which form the Bazaar are now extremely weakened by earthquakes of the past. Adoptations have made the Bazaar very even furher volatile to a future eartquake.
I sincerely wish that this matter is taken seriously and proper measures are taken, and not neglected.