Eski Fine Arts and Antiques
Grand Bazaar dealer in rare 19th- and 20th-century artefacts from Russia, Greece, Egypt and Germany: masks, medallions, and jewellery at Istanbul's crossroads.
Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar has seen centuries of objects pass through its vaulted corridors, and Eski Fine Arts and Antiques is one of the more honest chroniclers of that traffic. The shop’s appeal is its geographic range: relics from Russia, Germany, Greece, and Egypt share cabinet space with Anatolian pieces, creating a collection as cosmopolitan as the city that houses it.
The speciality is the period between roughly 1800 and 1950: the decades in which empires contracted, borders shifted, and objects migrated in ways that would never be repeated. Medallions from disbanded regiments sit alongside jewellery that left cities during upheavals, and rare masks that carry the specific silence of other rooms.
For the serious collector, Eski offers the kind of inventory that rewards repeated visits. Nothing here follows a tidy curatorial theme; the point is the accumulation, the sense that Istanbul, by virtue of its geography and history, became the resting place for objects that would be impossible to find in their countries of origin.
For the design-literate traveller who wants something to take home that could not have come from anywhere else, the shop delivers on that promise with a considered density that more tourist-facing antique dealers rarely achieve.
The Bazaar’s scale can disorient; Eski rewards those who slow down and look carefully. The antiquities here are genuinely one of a kind, and the story behind each piece, if you ask, turns out to be worth the search.
