At the Grand Bazaar and Egyptian Market, Istanbul, Turkey

Dear readers, let us continue our tour of markets, which are always fun.  One of the oldest and grandest anywhere is the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul. According to Wikipedia, the Büyük Çarşı, meaning "Grand Bazaar" is one of the largest and oldest covered markets in the world. It contains 61 covered streets and 3,000 shops, and may attract 250,000 to 400,000 visitors every day.

When I was here in the 1960s, it was still pretty authentic (= smelly, dark, questionable sanitary standards, suspicious jewelry).  Unfortunately, I do not have any photographs from that era.  Bad or good news (depending on your opinion of modernization):  today it is clean, well-lit, and the vendors take credit cards. There are even ATMs for your convenience.  That takes some of the fun out of the experience.  However, keeping up with the times is how a 500-year-old institution thrives.  We were warned that many of the authentic "Turkish" carpets are made in China now.

Trivia question:  What James Bond movie has some scenes in the Grand Bazaar?  Answer:  From Russia with Love, the second Bond film, released in 1963 and starring Sean Connory.

Proceed east, downhill towards the Golden Horn, and you reach the Egyptian Market. On a Sunday, this is a lot of fun. The barrel-vaulted building, dating from 1660, is also known as the Spice Bazaar (Turkish: 'Mısır Çarşısı'). The "Egypt" part of the name may come from the fact that revenues from Egypt, then part of the Ottoman Empire, helped pay for construction.

You can buy clothing, all sorts of nuts and spices, and the normal farmers' market stuff. The dry figs that I ate here and in central Anatolia were the most delicious I have ever tasted.

These are a bit more mysterious.  Do you eat the red berries or the yellow husk?

If figs or unusual fruits are not enough, visit the operatic gyro vendor.  His pita sandwiches looked really good, as did the fries and chilled juices, and he sings for you.

When it is time for a drink, these gents sell genuine freshly-squeezed orange juice, but I am not sure if they sing.

In keeping with the theme of appreciating the local ladies of the market, this trio is has plenty of attitude.

I suppose this little guy also had attitude.

If you prefer quieter ladies, some of them are missing parts of their heads, while others are missing their undergarments.

When you tire of the crush of people at the markets, cross the Golden Horn on the Galata Bridge (Galata Köprüsü). The waterway has been spanned by bridges since the time of Justinian the Great. Leonardo da Vinci designed a bridge for this site, but the sultan chose not to build it. This is the view back across the Horn, with the Süleymaniye (Süleymaniye Camii) Ottoman imperial Mosque on the skyline.

Walk along the waterfront west of the Galata Bridge, and you come to a casual restaurant that grills freshly-caught sardines, served at tiny tables.  They have big crunchy rolls, so you can make a sardine Po-Boy. Good company, a beer, sardines, the Golden Horn: it doesn't get much better than this....

Older market posts:

• Athens Flea Market today.
• Athens Flea Market in the early-1950s
• Athens Central Market
• Farmer market in Vrahati, Greece
• Reading Terminal Market, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Asan Chowk in Kathmandu, Nepal
• Ladies of Nepal 

Most Istanbul photographs were taken with a Sony DSC-W7 compact digital camera.

Ladies of the Athens Flea Market, Athens, Greece

In the previous post, we saw the Athens Flea Market in the early 1950s. Today, it is more refined, and most of the stores sell inexpensive new manufactured goods. Many even accept credit cards. But Sunday is still a good day to explore, and you never know what a vendor will produce from a bulging suitcase.

Monastiraki Metro station, Athens

The best way to reach the market is to take the metro to the Monastiraki Metro Station.

Turn right as you emerge from the station, and you see the old mosque with the Acropolis in the distance. The mosque was built in 1759 and now houses the modern pottery collection of the Museum of Greek Popular Art. This is one of the few buildings remaining from the Turkish era.

Turn right again and you will see the opening to Hephaestou Street. As the sign says, open every day.

I promised ladies, and here they are, complete with odd sweaters and underwear (or no underwear).

Do you prefer the tough lady look? Here is the military style

Or how about a Soviet babushka (ба́бушка)? I saw a surprising amount of old Soviet equipment, but nothing interesting like genuine military-issue watches or rocket launchers. 

Warning, warning: Greek Zombie attack. 

 And now the red riding look. The wolf might like her. 

To demonstrate equal opportunity, here are the gents of the Flea Market. Regardless of your tastes, there is plenty to see.

(If you would like to see some other lovely market ladies, come to the markets in old Kathmandu or Venice).

Most frames are from a Panasonic G1 digital camera (the first generation micro four thirds camera), some with an older Sony DSC-W7 compact camera.

The Athens Flea Market, 1951

In a previous post on the Pláka district of Athens, I described how the flea market has changed over the decades, becoming much more gentrified. The market is in the Monastiraki (Greek: Μοναστηράκι = little monastery) neighborhood just to the north of Pláka. To check if my memory was correct about the character of the flea market decades ago, I scanned some of the family's 1950s black and white film negatives.

In the early 1950s, Greece was just emerging from the brutal civil war, and the country was desperately poor. US aid was pouring in, but people were still impoverished (except for war profiteers - that is an especially ugly story).*  A flea market like this was the place to raise a bit of cash, barter some odd metal scrap for some clothing, or buy an old steel bedstead.

More treasures for sale. I recall that you often saw Greek men hanging around, seemingly without work. I also remember many crippled veterans in the post-war era.

This is a Kodachrome slide from 1953 converted to monochrome.

A tourist in the market. Notice, he is wearing a suit. Even at leisure in those days, gents often wore suits. Sixty years later, we have become a nation of swine.

This is the view of the Agora with the Theseion temple in the distance. The train below is the original metro, the Athens-Piraeus Electric Railway (Greek: Η.Σ.Α.Π. - Ηλεκτρικοί Σιδηρόδρομοι Αθηνών-Πειραιώς, Ilektrikoi Sidirodromoi Athinon - Pireos). The rail line from Piraeus to Theseion was inaugurated in February 1869 as a steam train. The route was extended to Omonoia Square and electrified in 1904, making this one of the world's oldest metros.

This may be the end of Athenas Street where it meets Omonoia Square. I remember policemen with their white gloves directing traffic from the round pedestals. Later, sometime in the 1950s, the municipal government installed traffic signals throughout Athens. 

1906 street scene, single panel from a stereo card

• Title: Street scene, Athens, Greece
• Creator(s): Keystone View Company., 
• Date Created/Published: Meadville, Pa. ; St. Louis, Mo. ; San Francisco, Cal. ; Toronto, Can. ; New York, N.Y. ; London, England : Keystone View Company, Manufacturers and Publishers, 1906. Copyright 1906
• Medium: 1 photograph : print on card mount ; mount 9 x 18 cm (stereograph format)
• Summary: Stereograph showing outdoor market with street vendors and their merchandise.
• Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-stereo-1s25683 (digital file from original) LC-USZ62-65909 (b&w film copy neg. of right half stereo)
• Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication.
  
• Call Number: STEREO FOREIGN GEOG FILE - Greece--Athens [item] [P&P]
• Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

Back to the Pláka District: here is the Temple of the Winds. The 1800s houses were still authentic and unrestored then.

Finally, here is the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, on the south flanks of the Acropolis. Workmen are setting up chairs for a concert. The theater was built in 161 AD by a wealthy Athenian, Herodes Atticus, and is still in use for the annual Athens Festival. The seats are rock hard (really!) - take a cushion. Notice the view of the city in the background.  It looks like a village.

Technical note: Most of these negatives are Ansco Ultra Speed film. Fortunately, we saved them all these years. My dad exposed the film with his Canon rangefinder camera (possibly a model IIB) with a 50 mm ƒ/1.9 Serenar lens. This was a Japanese post-war replica of the German Leica IIIC camera and the Leica 5 cm ƒ/2 Summitar lens. The Serenar lens was not as good optically but still capable of fine work. The edges of the frames are a bit soft. The negatives were scratched and dirty, but I did not retouch. I scanned them on a Plustek 7600i 35mm scanner using Silverfast Ai software. A couple of the negatives were so thin, I would never have tried to print optically through an enlarger, but the Silverfast was able to extract a surprising amount of picture information. Black and white film is an amazingly archival storage material. Will we be able to read our digital files in 65 years?

* For a detailed description of the terrible World War II years, see:

Mazower, Mark, 1995.  Inside Hitler's Greece, The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 437 p.

Many of Greece's elite collaborated with the Nazis and became wealthy. And in Thessaloniki, many Greeks willingly let the Nazis deport Jewish merchants and profited by taking over their businesses and property. It was vile and shameful.
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For 2013 revisit to the Plaka area, please click here.
For a description of the Leica cameras that we used over the years, please click here.

Gorgeous View, Haphazard Town: Porto Empedocle, Sicily

Porto Empedocle is a seaport in southern Sicily. Most tourists in the area do not bother with the Port because their destination is the famous Valle dei Templi (Valley of the Temples or in Sicilian: Vaddi di li Tempri), an astonishing ancient Greek archaeological site in nearby Agrigento. On a recent road trip around Sicily, the coast highway E931 took me right through Porto Empedocle, and it looked too interesting to not stop.

The town is the terminus for ferry boats that go to the islands of Linosa and Lampedusa. Lampedusa, only 110 km from the coast of Tunisia, was in the news in 2011 because thousands of escapees from Libya and Tunisia were quarantined there in refugee camps. Remote Linosa was once a penal colony for Mafia chieftains and thugs. In the 1930s, dictator Benito Mussolini almost succeeded in eradicating the Mafia by executing hundreds (thousands) and banishing hundreds to prison camps on Linosa. But the American forces in 1943 enlisted the Mafia to help overthrow the Germans, put the Mafia back in power in rural towns all over Sicily, and the rest is history (Duncan, P. 1994. Sicily: A Traveller's Guide, John Murray Publishers Ltd.).

The town is built on two levels. The port and lower town are on the coastal plain, while the upper town is about 100 m higher on a limestone ridge. The lower town is a warren of twisty lanes with haphazard multi-floor apartments. Some may be late 1800s-vintage, but most look like dumpy post-World War II units, with an occasional modern monstrosity. The photographs above were taken from the Via Mare road that runs along the ridge.

Up on the ridge, all of the apartment blocks look to be post-1960s. The town has been known for its sulfur mines since antiquity. Do all these people work at the sulfur factory?

We saw some children playing, but the streets were pretty quiet mid-day on a Saturday. A supermarket tucked into the basement of one of these apartments was busy.

The streets reminded me of people's housing blocks I saw in the old Soviet Union, except here there were more private cars and the general maintenance condition was better.

Do not let me discourage you: Sicily is a spectacular tourist destination, and the people are very friendly.  The history spans the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Moors, and Normans.

Photographs taken with a Panasonic G1 digital camera. These look different then my previous Panasonic images because I processed the raw files with Photo Ninja. This is an amazing software that extracts subtle details from the files - highly recommended!

Mississippi Basin Model construction and instruments

Regular readers may remember my earlier posts about the Mississippi Basin Model from early 2010, July 2010, and Dec. 2010. This was the most comprehensive hydraulic model ever built, meaning it covered the largest land extent of any model. The Corps of Engineers also built a Chesapeake Bay Model and one of San Francisco Bay. The Chesapeake model only had a full operational life of three years and is now gone.  But the San Francisco model still exists and is open to visitors in a warehouse in Sausalito.

Building a model like this is a complex project requiring precise scaling and ultra-precise shaping of the terrain. I found some photographs that help explain how a scale physical hydraulic model like this is constructed.

In the first photograph, metal templates that show the topography have been laid out across the soil at specified intervals. The templates usually have vertical exaggeration, such as 1:10, meaning vertical distance is scaled 10 times greater than the horizontal scale. Then the soil is moved and shaped to approximately match the templates.

At the Mississippi Basin Model, the original earth work, excavating canals, and installing piping was performed by German prisoners of war.  The Germans were repatriated in 1946, and civilian employees completed the rest of the model.  The template method of shaping the terrain was used between 1946 and approximately 1953. But the expansive soil in the area required a shift to the contour method of construction (not shown in these photographs).

In the second photograph, the workers are carefully pouring concrete and shaping the surface to exactly match the top of the templates. This is painstaking work requiring years of experience. The labor, time, and space requirements underscore why building physical models is so expensive.

This is an electronic water-level follower, meaning an instrument to measure water level. Notice that electronic circuits means vacuum tubes!

Finally, here is one of the Stevens chart recorders that plots the water level over time. As the paper drum turns, an ink pens moves up and down on the guide rails.

This is a January, 2010, photograph of one of the controls rooms at the Basin Model. Since then, all the Stevens recorders have been removed, probably stolen.

Historical black and white photographs courtesy of the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory, Engineer Research and Development Center, US Army Corps of Engineers.