Shops in Istanbul are the lifeblood of the city. The the town owed much of its past fame and fortune to its perfect location at the centre of ancient trade routes between East and West and even now the Bosphorus presents the spectacle of a constant parade of container ships ferrying everything from agricultural produce to narcotics, to and from the Black Sea ports and the world at large.

The city has always consumed its fair share of that trade and all the exchange had to be housed somewhere. So with considerable foresight Mehmet the Conqueror founded the Kapali Carshi - the Grand Bazaar - in 1461. It is now the oldest shopping mall in the world, a city unto itself of around 5,500 shops, attracting tourists and locals alike with the rarefied allure of fine carpets, precious antiques and artfully wrought jewellery as well as the quotidian promise of acres of fake label handbags and dirt-cheap clothes. Finding one's way through, or even surviving, the bewildering array of stores and products, the noise, the hawkers and the essential haggling requires a tough sensibility, but a visit to what is the greatest oriental bazaar of them all is rightly considered de rigueur.