August 2023

The Ayvalik Thursday Bazaar


Where is Ayvalik?


The Ayvalik Area with Cunda Anchorage

When the next Thursday came around, we were determined to find the Thursday Bazaar. We'd done some homework to figure out where the bazaar actually was. Our top suspect was another large covered area, near to the ferry docks and to Ayvalik Marina, called "Ayvalik Sebze Ve Meyveciler Odasi," which translates to "Ayvalik Vegetable and Fruit Growers Room." OK that had potential.

We anchored Awildian off the little town of Cunda and dinghied to the town quay, where we caught one of the many ferries to Ayvalik.


The first two passengers

Ferries came and went from Cunda's town quay every half hour for most of the day, and the cost per person for the 15-minute ride was 40 Turkish lira (about $1.50 USD). The cargo and passengers of the ferries were varied and interesting. On our trip, a huge bouquet of balloons rode above the wheelhouse, tied to the railings; women's clothing ran the gamut from full burkas to skimpy bikinis; men were dressed in everything from crisp linen shirts with trousers, to colorful shorts with t-shirts; children scampered around; the scruffy crew hung out in the shade of the wheelhouse with the skipper; some passengers, who, like ourselves, were on their way to the bazaar, carried bags or had rolling carts. People-watching in this part of the world is fascinating.

This time we got it right! After we disembarked in Ayvalik, we joined the steady stream of people who were walking up Ayvalik's narrow streets toward the bazaar. Long before we got to the "vegetable and fruit growers room," we started seeing evidence of the bazaar: tables set up along the street, loaded with all kinds of wares; clothing - everything from dresses to shorts to bras - hanging over the street like multicolored flags; food vendors; spice sellers; ice cream stands. It was such an exotic experience!











On one of the tables we saw small bags of dried hibiscus flowers (what the Mexicans call "jamaica" - pronounced "hah-MIKE-ah"), which got us very excited. Why such a tizzy about dried flowers? During the year and a half that we'd lived in Mexico aboard SCOOTS, we'd made a delicious and refreshing sun tea from dried hibiscus flowers, drinking gallons and gallons of the stuff. But we hadn't been able to find any of the dried flowers since leaving Mexico in 2016. Finding them now, thousands of miles away in Turkey, made our day. We bought five of the bags for the equivalent of a dollar each.

We also scored a couple of kilos of some roasted coffee beans, a rarity as most coffee in the Med is already ground.

We finally arrived at the "vegetable and fruit growers room." This was a huge open-sided, metal-roofed structure with hundreds of vendors selling all kinds of fresh and dried foods: veggies and fruits, eggs, olives, spices, cheese, nuts, and on and on. It was almost overwhelming. But in a good way.


This sign, just outside the Bazaar, translates as "Ayvalik Municipality Goods Market." Looks like we'd finally arrived!



I was particularly hoping to find a spice vendor, to buy some local herbs and spices. I'd made a list of about twenty herbs and spices that I hoped to buy, and then translated each of them into its Turkish equivalent. I thought that this might make the transaction easier.



It did. When we located a spice merchant, I handed him my list. He took things from there, locating each item in one of the dozens of buckets and bins lined up in front of his booth, and scooping them into small bags using a long, shovel-shaped scoop.


The spice vendor's stall

When he got to the basil (reyhan), he surprised me by dipping from a large bin of purple leaves. He only had purple basil, no green. That should make some pretty interesting pesto!

At one point, he started to put a big scoop of saffron threads into a bag until I waved him off. In my experience, saffron is very expensive. I almost never use it, and I just wanted a little bit of it. Turns out that saffron isn't expensive here. Cool! Maybe I'll have to find some recipes that use saffron. In fact the total cost of twenty or so bags of herbs and spices was less than $20 USD.

Another merchant was selling eggs. At his booth were two baskets full of eggs, with slightly different prices. I wondered what the difference was between them. I pointed to each of the baskets in turn and shrugged.


This very clearly says, "free range chicken eggs." I think it's cute that the word gezen translates to "traveling." So, eggs from traveling chickens. :)

He pointed to one basket and pantomimed the sides of a box. Then he pointed to the other basket and made a running motion with his fingers. I got it! One basket had eggs from caged hens, the other were free-range. I bought a dozen of the free-range eggs.


Buying the free-range eggs

Oh my gosh, the olives!! We had never seen so many different types of olives. Bins and buckets of green ones and black ones, wrinkled and smooth ones, wet-brined and dry ones; some that had even been roasted, with the grill marks to prove it. Eric doesn't like olives, but I do. I sampled two or three kinds and discovered my new favorite olive: dry-cured black olives. Yum!


My new favorite kind of olives.

Buying fruits and veggies was an interesting experience, too. For one thing, we had no idea what some of the things were, or how to prepare them if we'd bought them.


What are these? Thanks to Google Translate, we learned that these are fresh hazelnuts.

But there were plenty of the usual, recognizable fruits and veggies, too, and at a very good price. The vendors expected their customers to bargain, something that we definitely couldn't do. Everything had a price clearly displayed, so we just paid the list price. To us, those prices were already really inexpensive, so we didn't mind. But apparently the vendors felt bad that we'd paid full price, because most of them slipped some extra produce into our bag after we'd paid.

Since we didn't know the names for the numbers in Turkish, and the vendors didn't speak any English, they had clever ways to show us what we owed them: some would dig through their cash box and pull out examples of the bills and coins that we should give them, others would punch the numbers into a calculator and show us the display.

Long ago we learned that speaking different languages isn't an insurmountable issue. Smiles, patience, ingenuity, and goodwill go a long way toward communication. Oh, and Google Translate. Definitely Google Translate.

With Rolly stuffed full with our purchases, we walked back to the ferry dock. We boarded a ferry just as it was leaving, paid our 40 lira, and relaxed for the fifteen-minute trip back to Cunda. Once there, dinghied back to Awildian and began finding places for everything we'd bought. It took awhile.