Grand Bazaar, Istanbul

Where it sits. The Grand Bazaar, Kapalıçarşı in Turkish, occupies a whole quarter of the historic peninsula between the Beyazıt and Nuruosmaniye mosques, uphill from the Golden Horn and about 600 metres west of Hagia Sophia. It is a covered city rather than a market hall: roughly 60 lanes under vaulted and domed roofs, something over 4,000 shops, and around twenty gates, of which the Nuruosmaniye and Beyazıt entrances take most of the traffic. Tens of thousands of people work inside, and on a busy day several hundred thousand pass through. The lanes are named by trade — Kalpakçılar Caddesi for the goldsmiths, Kuyumcular for jewellers, Yağlıkçılar for textiles — a hangover from the guild system that once assigned each craft its own street.

The story behind it. Mehmed II ordered the first structure in the years immediately after the conquest of 1453: the İç Bedesten, also called the Cevahir Bedesten, a stone-built and lockable warehouse for high-value goods, completed around 1461. The Sandal Bedesten followed in the sixteenth century for silk cloth. Wooden shops and lanes accumulated around them, were roofed over, burned, and were rebuilt — major fires struck in 1546, 1618, 1701 and 1954, and the earthquake of 1894 forced a general reconstruction that produced much of the layout in use today. Revenue from the bazaar endowed the mosque complexes around it, which is why the market and the mosques are physically fused. Scattered through the lanes are older hans, courtyard buildings such as the Zincirli Han and the Cebeci Han, where workshops still make and repair what the shops sell.

On screen. The Grand Bazaar carries the pre-title sequence of Skyfall (2012), Sam Mendes's first Bond film and Daniel Craig's third. Bond and the field agent Eve Moneypenny, played by Naomie Harris, pursue the mercenary Patrice through Istanbul after a stolen hard drive listing undercover NATO agents. The chase runs from the Eminönü waterfront and the streets below the Spice Bazaar, where a Land Rover and a Volkswagen Beetle come to grief, to the moment Bond takes a motorcycle up onto the domed lead roofs of the covered market and rides the ridgelines above the shoppers. The rooftop riding was done on the bazaar itself by stunt riders after long negotiation with the market's administration and the city, with the roof protected and repaired; the crash down through a skylight into a covered lane was completed on a stage at Pinewood. The sequence then leaves the city for Adana Province, where the fight on the roof of a moving train and Bond's fall were staged at the Varda Viaduct. The earlier From Russia with Love (1963) worked a few streets away, at Hagia Sophia, the Basilica Cistern and Sirkeci station.

What it is actually like inside. Loud, warm, and much less confusing than it looks, because the main axis runs straight between the Nuruosmaniye and Beyazıt gates and everything hangs off it. The gold trade is the bazaar's real business: shop windows on Kalpakçılar carry bullion chains sold by weight against the daily price, and the jewellers' scales are checked by the market's own inspectors. Around it sit carpets and kilims, Ottoman-revival ceramics from Kütahya, copper, brass, backgammon boards, leather, and a heavy layer of tourist merchandise. The İç Bedesten in the middle is where the antique dealers cluster — old silver, watches, icons, calligraphy — and it is quieter and better lit than the rest. Prices are negotiated as a matter of course, and the opening figure at a tourist-facing stall bears little relation to the closing one.

Practical detail. The bazaar keeps shop hours, roughly nine to seven, and closes on Sundays and on the first days of the two religious holidays, which catches many visitors out. The Beyazıt tram stop on the T1 line is at the western gate; the Çemberlitaş stop is convenient for the Nuruosmaniye side. There are tea houses, a couple of small mosques, ATMs, and public toilets near the Zincirli Han. Pickpocketing is the standard risk in the crush. Floors are stone and mostly level, but the lanes are narrow and packed, and the outer approach streets are steep in every direction.

Timing. Weekday mornings are the calmest hours and the best time to talk to anyone seriously about a carpet. Late afternoon brings the heaviest crowds. Combining a visit with the neighbouring Spice Bazaar downhill at Eminönü, and with the book market at Sahaflar Çarşısı by the Beyazıt gate, makes a coherent half-day; the domed roofs the motorcycle rode across are best seen from the terraces of cafés on the Nuruosmaniye side.