The Spice Market as Lieux de Memoire, the Present and Future
The Spice Market remains very much alive and fluid today. One of its most significant characteristics is that it is composed of people; the bazaar signifies the shopkeepers and customers that occupy and pass through it, as well as the transactions and human interactions that are exchanged between them, just as much as it does the physical and structural architecture of the bazaar. As much as the physical market itself has evolved in form and function throughout the years, having become commercialized to a degree and much of its original goods replaced with typical tourist souvenirs, it retells the context of its encompassing structure and the city of Istanbul throughout its journey. The locals and tourists that flock to the bazaar collectively partake in a constant flow of energy, curiosity and life that pass through the site every day and make the bazaar a lieux de memoire that has no singular, concrete meaning and history but a constantly evolving and openly shared one.
Although to today’s visitors, the Spice Market may seem like just another place to purchase exotic goods from the intersection of the East and the West. However, as visible through the five moments in the site’s history covered in previous pages of this exhibit, the Spice Market bears much greater historical, cultural and social significance than a simple market. It has served as both a part of daily life to the shopkeepers and locals that have been frequenting the site for years, as well as a truly global hub of cultural exchange and discovery to all those historical foreign tradesmen as well as modern tourists hailing from both the East and West. The crucial role that the Spice Market has played in the public and social life of Istanbul's citizens, the tradesmen and tourists from all over the globe, and the historicultural timeline of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires as well as modern-day Turkey make the Spice Market an undeniably universal symbol for both those within and beyond Istanbul. Our visual and intellectual memories of the Spice Market differs depending on our own identities, the historical timeframe, and societal context we are focusing on, and all of these diverse and ongoing memories in time gather to form this rich and alive lieux de memoire that reflects both the past and future of Istanbul.