Market vendors take great pains to make their wares attractive to potential buyers, and I suspect there are styles of display that could be identified, just as there are vocal come-ons that could be recorded. There’s not much that’s haphazard, and a lot of virtuoso arrangement goes into setup (indeed, photographing the process of setup would be a wonderful challenge). The two markets we visited, one daily (Adapazarı) and the other weekly (Sapanca), were a delicious introduction to vast complexities, and all I managed to do was collect a tiny fragment of the rich variety. It takes me a long time to become comfortable enough to really see what’s around me, and I regret that I hurried through both markets and didn’t do much to communicate with the sellers –most of whom were professionally friendly and entirely willing to talk to even a tongue-tied and clueless foreigner. I could ask the polite question (Fotoğrafınızı çekebilir miyim?) but not much more. It was easier to communicate with piles of cabbages and buckets of olives…
So here are some of the results:
There’s something fascinating about the display of single commodities, even if they’re nominally identical (I mean, a potato is a potato, except when it’s being an Individual, right?):
And bulk goods are carefully arrayed too: