Marion and I spent Xmas and New Year in Istanbul (well, actually, New Year and the Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice, as Xmas hardly exists there and we like it that way).
One place we went to was one I've been curious to visit for a long time: the centre of Turkey's cassette/CD/DVD industry. From the addresses printed on Turkish music media, it looked as if they all came from the same building.
They do. It's one of a series of multi-storey buildings with central courtyards, the "IMC Blok"s (there's a dot under the C) near the Ataturk Bridge. You can probably see them on Google Earth. So, we easily found the music one (also worth finding as it has the cheapest Turkish coffee in town, from a stall at the bottom level). It has maybe a hundred different record labels all with their own shopfront. Bought a great pile of Turkish music CDs, but in the process noticed there were at least two other enormous multistorey buildings nearby.
One of them sells nothing but furnishing fabric. I have no idea how many shops there were there, but they cover so many options that if you wanted ostrich-leather sofa covering with gold-embossed motifs of plumbing fixtures, I'm sure there'd be somebody there who can find it.
*Doesn't* do industrial canopy fabrics and tenting though, there's another street just for that nearby...The other "blok" appears to be *nothing but sewing machines*. Almost all industrial, dozens of shops on maybe seven levels, each one with hundreds of machines on display. Some were dealers for a specific maker (Juki had a huge shop), others had second-hand stuff from every imaginable maker. Everything from small domestic machines labelled in Arabic to enormous 24-thread three-phase industrial sergers and all sorts of doodads for ultra-specific tasks, most of which neither Marion nor I could begin to guess at. After a circuit of one floor Marion said "I've seen more sewing machines in the last two minutes than in the rest of my life put together". The range of accessories was equally gobsmacking. No matter how specialized and obscure the foot you're after might be, somebody in here's going to have one.
If you want your mind boggled this place is well worth a visit. We also found the clothing district south of the Grand Bazaar which must be where many of these machines end up; vast buildings with entire floors devoted to men's ties or monogram labels for school uniforms. Much of it was closed for the holiday (4 days for the Feast of the Sacrifice). When it's all open you could get lost in there for weeks.
Then there's the Street of Buttons, the shops that sell nothing but washing-instruction and size labels, and somewhere (didn't find it this time) a shop that sells nothing but faked woven designer labels on the roll. Your local haberdashery shop will never look the same again after a visit to Istanbul.
[followups to rctq]============== j-c ====== @ ====== purr . demon . co . uk ============== Jack Campin: 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland | tel 0131 660 4760 for CD-ROMs and free | fax 0870 0554 975 stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, & Mac logic fonts | mob 07800 739 557