Istanbul’s Spice Bazaar

The sumac is the wine-colored spice near the top right hand corner. Photo by David Lansing.

There was one place I wanted to go to near the Grand Bazaar and that’s the Spice Bazaar. Originally built as an extension of the New Mosque complex back in the early 17^th century, the revenue from this cavernous market once helped maintain the mosques philanthropic institutions.

Stalls in the bazaar showcase a plethora of spices, herbs, and teas in the most beautiful manner—sometimes in pyramids, other times in colorful mounds. There are also sweet shops here with wonderful dried fruits (apricots!) and dozens of different types of Turkish Delight (lokum), made with chopped dates, pistachios, hazelnuts, walnuts, almonds, coconut, lemon, apricots, mandarins, honey, rosewater, even chocolate.

But I wasn’t interested in Turkish Delight. What I was looking for was sumac, a spice I’d noticed in several of the chopped tomato salads we’d had in various restaurants. It adds a lovely lemony taste to not only salads but also to a meze dish like humus or lahmacun, the Turkish pizza.

You don’t see sumac at your traditional grocery store back home. Maybe because most people, like me, have always thought of sumac as being poisonous. Which it is. Or at least, some sumac plants are poisonous (like poison ivy and poison oak, sumac is a member of the Rhus genus; the poison sumac has white fruit instead of the deep red orbs found on the sumac ground for spice in Turkey).

Anyway, I found my sumac and bought a small bag of it, along with some apple tea to take back home.