This is the kind of picture you can stare at for hours, and keep finding new things. Well, old things in this case. This is the Bazar de Stamboul, presumably in Instanbul, ca 1880s. It is awash with with lamps, water pipes, textiles, ceramics, jewelry, furnishing, and things that I can’t even guess what they may be. American hearing the term ‘bazar’ usually think of a huge marketplace, but the term is often used to refer to a shop selling used goods … not quite antiques, more of a second-hand shop. Since this photo is over 100 years old it looks like an antique shop to us, but contemporaries would not have viewed it as such.

The photo is by Swedish photographer Guillaume Berggren (1835-1920) who settled in Constantinople in 1866 and opened a studio in the Pera district in the early 1870s. He is best known for his portraits, particularly of the every-day working people of the city in the 1890s, but also made a wide variety of city-scape images, portraits of travelers and dignitaries, monumental buildings and ruins from the surrounding region, construction projects, and other works.