Work and Shopping in Ottoman Towns

The Ottoman Empire lasted from about 1300 to 1922 and brought together towns with different markets, occupations and household economies. Safranbolu, in present-day Türkiye, developed as a caravan station and craft center, while Istanbul supported neighborhood shops, public baths and endowed kitchens. Dated examples from these towns show how goods reached retail sellers, how workers served customers, and how institutions directed food and income.

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Craft premises in Safranbolu

Safranbolu became a commercial station on routes through Anatolia in the thirteenth century. Its market district, Çukur, grew around shops and craft workshops. Leatherworkers, blacksmiths, saddlers, shoemakers and textile workers worked in this commercial quarter. In Kıranköy, tradespeople lived above their shops, combining a workroom and household in the same building. Tools, goods and family living space could therefore sit close to customers, while other work took place in separate premises.

This townscape changed with trade and transport. Safranbolu reached a commercial high point in the seventeenth century, when its market expanded to serve travelers; a large inn built between 1640 and 1648 accommodated that traffic. Private estates and new buildings followed in the nineteenth century. The railway and changing routes then reduced the town’s role as a stopping point. Supplies moving between towns and countryside connected local shops with wider routes, where merchants carried goods between producers and urban sellers.

Grocers, cheese and regulated prices

Historian Sümeyye Hoşgör Büke’s study of eighteenth-century Istanbul probate inventories, estate lists prepared after a person’s death, counted 104 grocer probate inventories and identified 84 distinct shops. A 1728 inventory for grocer Yani records four shops in Galata, an Istanbul district, but gives stock details for only three. Vermicelli, starch, olives, clarified butter and onions appear in each of those three; kashkaval cheese, hemp seed and rice appear in two, while hazelnuts, peanuts, vinegar and garlic occur in one. These item lists show the range each recorded shop could offer.

An Istanbul court hearing in 1217 AH (1802–03) shows how some goods moved through the retail chain. Merchants brought kashkaval and tulum cheeses from outside the city. Grocers sought the exclusive right to buy and resell those cheeses, while other sellers argued that merchants had long supplied them too. After hearing both sides with the market inspector present, the court ordered grocers and Odunkapısı dealers and carriers to buy from merchants and resell at the current narh, the official price set for the goods. It also barred either group from hiding stock to sell it above the regulated price. The judgment linked wholesale purchase and retail resale in one dispute.

Historian Ahmet Kal’a’s account of Ottoman commerce describes experienced craftsmen, called ehl-i hibre, judging disputes about workmanship or quality and helping establish prices. Officials reset staple-food narh in response to scarcity, abundance and changing costs. Bread, meat, fats and dairy goods could be reassessed yearly or several times in a year, tying regulated prices to provisioning conditions.

Bathhouses and their workers

Public baths were workplaces and businesses as well as washing facilities. Historian Ahmet Yaşar’s study of an Istanbul survey from 1766 records 195 public baths, their locations, charitable endowments, rents, tenants and holders of operating rights. Many baths belonged to a waqf, a charitable endowment, and were run by an operator who rented the premises. In many cases that operator paid rent both to the endowment and to a separate holder of the bath’s operating right.

Bath workers had distinct tasks. Historian Nina Ergin’s study of the 1752 register identifies male tellaks, washers, and natırs among the listed staff. A separate study by researcher Gökçen Coşkun Albayrak describes attendants, barbers, laundry workers and employees who heated the water; washers used soap and a rubbing mitt called a kese. A seventeenth-century price register explains how payment worked: customers paid the bath’s customary fee and could give a washer an additional gratuity. Workers could not demand that extra payment, especially from poor customers and travelers; the bath operator remained entitled to the customary bath fee even when a customer tipped the washer.

Gökçen Coşkun Albayrak’s study of eighteenth-century probate inventories identifies women who managed bath businesses, including through ownership, leases and credit. The 1772 estate of Naile Hatun, operator of Sofular Hamam, lists loans secured by jewelry and furs pledged to lenders. Her creditors also included shopkeepers and artisans, including a grocer and a baker.

Household service and charitable bread

Household service was another source of urban work. Historians Yahya Araz and Irfan Kokdaş’s study of child domestic labor in nineteenth-century Istanbul describes children taken into households for upbringing and employment. During the first half of the century, these arrangements often combined service with charitable or reciprocal obligations; in the second half, wage labor and standardized legal contracts became more prominent.

A different institutional arrangement supplied bread through the Hamidiye imaret, an endowed charitable kitchen founded under Ottoman ruler Sultan Abdülhamid I in the late eighteenth century. The kitchen’s charter allocated 6,300 kile, an Ottoman grain-volume measure, of flour for 350 days, or 18 kile per day. It also specified daily fodula distributions, a leavened loaf associated with charitable kitchens, totaling 924 loaves for kitchen employees, religious and educational institutions, and people classified as poor or needy. Its staff list includes chefs and apprentices, bakers and apprentices, carriers of flour and wood, dishwashers and oven cleaners.

The charter set the kitchen’s regular allocation. A separate document registered in 1196 AH (1781) records the purchase of 13,000 kile of wheat from state storehouses, paid in four installments.