Bezesteni: Thessaloniki’s bedesten market

Depicted on the postcard is Bezesteni, the bedesten market in Thessaloniki, located on the corner of Venizelou and Solomou Streets. The postcard was in print from 1925 to 1930 and captures the foot traffic through one of the city’s most important commercial spots at one specific moment of its long history.

The bedesten is a type of indoor market/shopping centre popular during the Ottoman period in large cities across the Ottoman Empire. Various scientists give different estimates for when Bezesteni, Thessaloniki’s bedesten market, was erected. According to Astreinidou-Kotsaki, researchers speculate that it was constructed some time between 1455 and 1459, or later, between 1481 and 1512.

Due to being covered, bedestens became closely associated with the textile trade during the 16^th century. They were also spaces used for meeting, trading, and safekeeping valuable goods besides textiles, such as precious stones, jewellery, gold, and silver, all of which were often stored and traded there. They also functioned as caravan organising stations, slave trading sites and storage facilities for money and important documents. Bedestens were built in cities whose economies were linked with the textile trade, such as the ones in Adrianoupoli (Edirne), which became particularly associated with the trade of felt and cotton textiles, Ankara, known for its mohair fabric trade, Filippoupoli (Plovdiv) and, of course, Thessaloniki, renowned for the trade of wool textiles.

Karadimou-Yerolympos describes the transformations in the area around the Bezesteni during and after the Ottoman period as follows: ‘Thessaloniki has always been a quintessentially commercial city and, ever since the first centuries of the city’s existence, its expansive central market had sprawled over the area to the southwest of its Greco-Roman centre and the intersection of its two most important streets (Egnatia and Venizelou) all the way to the port. During the Ottoman rule (1430-1912), this space acquires even greater importance because it is the only form of centre the city has. Commercial streets covered haphazardly, inns with their square courtyards, narrow passages housing workshops, irregular intersections with their own coffee shops; they all fulfil the city’s needs for manufacturing, trade and all sorts of services and transactions. Originally, the city was organised by guild, spatially arranging professions in concentric circles, with the distance between them depending on the degree of holiness each type of merchandise held. Over the course of centuries, this rigid organisation gradually relaxed, but didn’t disappear.’

At the beginning of the 20^th century, after Thessaloniki’s integration into the Greek state, the Great Fire of 1917, and the mass arrival of refugees following the signing of the Lausanne Treaty, Bezesteni and the surrounding commercial area continued to play an important role in the city’s financial and commercial life. [On the transformations in the wider area around Bezesteni during the first quarter of the 20^th century, see also EKT013_ABC – The Karasso Arcade]