|
Copper and brass bowls,
plates, cups, trays, pitchers, cooking
pots, serving dishes and utensils were
common household items in Ottoman times,
so you'll find many of them for sale
in Turkey's bazaars, markets and antiques
shops today.
When I first arrived in Turkey in
1967, many of these items, some of
them centuries old, were on
sale cheap in the bazaars
as Turkey's housewives modernized to
aluminum, steel and plastic cookware.
Today there are not as many old pieces
on sale as the world's antiques
dealers discovered Turkey's
wealth of old copper and brass shortly
after I did (perhaps even through my
guidebooks!)
To discover the best places today,
you may need the help of personal shopper Marilyn
Hill-Henderson.
You may find some of the heavy
old pieces still, but mostly
what you'll see are modern copies
made of thinner copper. They're attractive,
decorative, useful and relatively
inexpensive.
Important! Don't use copper items
for cooking or serving unless
the surfaces that contact food are
completely covered in bright, silver-colored tin,
because copper is poisonous.
It used to be easy to find a tinner (kalayci) in
any Turkish town to apply the molten
tin to the inside of cooking vessels. Applying
the tin is an art: the molten
tin is poured into the copper vessel,
then swirled and brushed around in
only two or three seconds before it
cools to form a thin but complete coat. Pure
tin is expensive, so a good kalayci can
save you money!
Most people buy copper and brass items
for decoration rather
than cooking, but if you do intent
to cook, ask at the shop from which
you buy the items where you can get
them tinned.
Shopping
in Turkey Homepage
Antiquities
Warning!
About
Tours (and Shopping)
How
to Bargain for the Best Price
Turkish
Money
Travel
Details
Turkey
Travel Planner Homepage
|
