IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 506

Covered markets existed in Constantinople long before the Ottoman conquest of 1453, but the complex that visitors walk through today has a definite starting point. Soon after taking the city, Sultan Mehmed II ordered the construction of a stout vaulted building in the commercial heart of his new capital, close to the palace and the main road. Completed in the late 1450s and known as the Cevahir Bedesteni, or Jewel Bedesten, it was designed as a secure store for the most valuable merchandise, with thick masonry walls, few openings and a single locked entrance. Around that fortified core, everything else grew.

The bedesten was only the beginning. Merchants wanted to be near the place where valuables were kept and exchanged, so shops appeared along the lanes that led to it, and as trade expanded those lanes were roofed over with a series of domes and vaults. A second bedesten, the Sandal Bedesten, was built for the auction of textiles. The result was not a single market hall but a small walled town of commerce, entered through a number of gates that were shut at night, and it acquired the name by which it is still known in Turkish: Kapalicarsi, the covered market.

Its scale is difficult to grasp from the street. Inside, dozens of vaulted streets intersect, lined with several thousand shops whose fronts are barely wider than a doorway. There are two bedestens, several mosques and fountains, a bathhouse, offices where property deeds were registered, and a number of hans, courtyard buildings where travelling merchants could lodge their animals and their goods and stay for weeks at a time. Estimates of the number of shops vary, but the figure usually quoted is around four thousand, and the complex gives work to several thousand people. Wealthy traders occupied the upper floors; the ground floor served as warehouse and stable.

Trade was governed as tightly as the buildings were built. Each craft occupied its own street and belonged to a guild, whose officers fixed standards, settled disputes between members and decided who might open a shop. Prices for many goods were set by the state through a system known as narh, and inspectors walked the lanes checking weights, measures and quality. A merchant who cheated could be fined, publicly humiliated or expelled. This combination of a walled site and elaborate rules gave the bazaar a reputation for reliability that drew buyers from across the empire and beyond.

Money itself was part of the business. Sarrafs, money changers and in effect bankers, sat at counters near the entrances, exchanging currencies, advancing credit and holding deposits for merchants who preferred not to travel with coin. Their networks of credit extended to other Ottoman cities and to trading partners abroad, so that a debt could be settled in Istanbul on the strength of a letter rather than a shipment of gold. Credit of this kind allowed a merchant to buy a consignment of cloth in the spring and pay for it after the autumn sales, which mattered in a trade where goods moved slowly.

That accumulation of timber, textiles and paper made the bazaar extraordinarily vulnerable. Fires swept through it repeatedly in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and each time it was rebuilt, usually within a few years and usually in stone on the same plan. An earthquake in 1894 damaged the domes. A fire in 1943 destroyed a large section. Later restorations, particularly in the 1950s, removed some of the haphazard additions that had accumulated over the centuries.

The bazaar has attracted descriptions for as long as it has existed. The seventeenth-century Ottoman writer Evliya Celebi, who recorded the city street by street, left an account of its shops, crowds and customs. European travellers a century later wrote with astonishment of its size and its darkness. Between them, these witnesses describe a place that was as much a social institution as a shopping street. Written descriptions are useful precisely because the buildings themselves have changed so often.

Much of that character survives. Shops selling gold jewellery stand beside those selling carpets, leather, ceramics and copperware, and the gold market is watched closely enough that its prices are still reported in the Turkish press. Some streets serve tourists almost exclusively, with shopkeepers addressing passers-by in half a dozen languages, while others remain ordinary places where residents of the surrounding district buy towels, buttons and household goods. The bazaar has always contained both, and its resilience has depended on the mixture.

Today the balance is harder to maintain. High rents and the steady flow of visitors have pushed many small workshops out of the bazaar and into the surrounding streets, and some traditional trades have shrunk to a handful of practitioners. Restoration continues as well, financed partly by the charitable foundations that have owned the buildings for centuries. Conservation brings its own dilemmas, since a monument that is also a working market cannot simply be frozen as it was.

What the Grand Bazaar demonstrates is that a market is not a building but an arrangement. Its walls, gates and vaults were built to protect trade and to control it, and the rules enforced inside them mattered as much as the architecture. Visitors who come for the atmosphere are walking through the physical form of a system of trust, credit and regulation that is more than five centuries old.

A kiln is not simply a large oven. An oven cooks food by heating it, whereas a kiln must control two things at once: the temperature of the clay and the atmosphere surrounding it. In a traditional workshop it is usually the largest and most expensive object on the premises, built of brick, stone or fired clay and topped with a dome or a barrel vault. A firing that goes wrong wastes months of work.

The simplest kilns rely on natural draught: hot gases are drawn upwards through the structure because warm air rises. Fuel, usually wood, is burned in a firebox at the base, a chamber with an opening through which more can be pushed. Between the fire and the pots stands a low wall, the bagwall, which keeps flames and ash away from the ware and forces the hot gases to spread out. Without it, the flames would roar up one side of the chamber.

Above the ware chamber is a chimney, sometimes several metres tall, whose purpose is to create the pull of air that keeps the fire burning fiercely. In the side wall, at about eye level, is a spyhole: a small opening, closed with a plug of clay, through which the potter can inspect the pots. A metal plate called a damper, fitted inside the chimney, can be moved to regulate the draught.

Kilns are classified by the path the hot gases take. In an updraught, or climbing, kiln the gases rise from the firebox straight through the stacked pots and out of the chimney. Such kilns are cheap to build, but the bottom of the load tends to be hotter than the top. In a downdraught kiln the flames are deflected by a curved roof and drawn down through the pots to flues at floor level. The gases therefore pass every piece twice, and the temperature is more even.

Loading the kiln is slow, careful work. Pots are stacked on shelves or on one another, separated by small wads of clay, with gaps left so that the gases can pass between them. The first stage is the least dramatic and the most dangerous: any moisture left in the clay turns to steam. If the kiln is heated quickly, a pot can shatter with a sound like a gunshot. Potters therefore begin with a small fire and keep it low for several hours.

Above a few hundred degrees the clay itself begins to change. Between roughly 500 and 600 degrees Celsius the chemically combined water that forms part of the clay mineral is driven off, and the change cannot be reversed: a fired pot will not soften back into slip. At about 573 degrees Celsius the quartz in the clay undergoes a sudden change in its crystal structure and expands, so the temperature must be raised slowly through that point. Above about 900 degrees, vitrification begins: the particles fuse together and the body becomes harder, denser and less porous.

The atmosphere in the chamber matters as much as the temperature. With plenty of air the fire burns cleanly, and iron in the clay combines with oxygen so that the fired body turns red, orange or buff. If the air supply is restricted, the fire produces carbon monoxide, which takes oxygen from the iron oxide and leaves a grey or black body; potters call this reduction. Reduction also alters the colours of glazes, and in some traditions it is produced deliberately, the fire being allowed to smoulder. The potter judges the atmosphere by the flame at the spyhole.

A glaze is a thin layer of glassy material that melts onto the surface of the pot. Its melting point must match the temperature the clay can bear, which is one reason why recipes are guarded. Too refractory a glaze stays dry and rough; too fusible, and it runs off the pot onto the shelf. In wood-fired kilns the fuel contributes something of its own. Ash carried in the draught settles on the shoulders of the pots, melts and forms a greenish or amber glaze, so that the placing of a pot partly determines how it will look.

Knowing when to stop is difficult. Small pyramids of clay, known as cones, are placed among the pots: each softens and bends when a particular temperature has been reached. The potter can see through the spyhole which of them have fallen. Where there are no cones, the firing is judged by the glow inside the kiln, which passes from dull red through orange to white, and by the length of the flame at the chimney. At the end the firebox is sealed and the kiln left to cool, often for a day or more. Cooling too quickly causes thermal shock, which can ruin a whole kiln-load.

Much about traditional firing remains unrecorded. Potters working without instruments make decisions by eye and by ear, and their knowledge is passed on through apprenticeship rather than written down, so the variables that matter most are hard to identify from outside. The fuel itself is one: wood varies in species and in moisture content, so the same kiln, loaded in the same way, may behave differently from one firing to the next. Researchers who have measured traditional kilns report wide differences in fuel consumption and in emissions of smoke and particulates. Temperatures inside the chamber are rarely uniform, differing from shelf to shelf by tens of degrees.

On a June afternoon in 2019 a cruise ship lost control in the Giudecca Canal in Venice, struck a dock and collided with a moored riverboat, injuring several people. No one was killed, but the images of a vessel taller than the surrounding palaces edging through one of Europe's most fragile cities gave new force to a long-running argument. Two years later the Italian government banned large cruise ships from the canal. The question other ports now face is whether a city should limit the number of ships that call, and if so, how.

Cruising has grown from a niche holiday into a mass industry within a single lifetime. In the 1970s the world's cruise lines counted their passengers in the hundreds of thousands; the industry's own figures now put the annual total above thirty million. Ships have grown with the market: the largest now carry more than five thousand passengers and a crew of two thousand. A single call can put more people into a small historic centre in a morning than live there. Ports that once competed for a single weekly call now handle several ships on the same day.

The most concrete objection to cruise tourism is environmental. A ship at sea can burn fuel continuously, and while it is alongside it must still generate electricity for lighting, air conditioning, kitchens and pumps, which it does by running its engines. Studies of port air quality have repeatedly identified ships at berth as significant local sources of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and fine particles. The fuels traditionally used at sea are heavier and dirtier than road diesel, and although international rules have forced a switch to cleaner grades, a large ship still burns a great deal of it.

Cruise passengers also arrive in a pattern that is unusually hard on the places they visit. They come in bursts, disembark within a few minutes of one another and are often back on board by late afternoon. Researchers who study port economies have generally found that a cruise passenger leaves far less in the local economy per day than a visitor staying in a hotel. Excursions are frequently sold on board, and much of the food and drink is supplied by the vessel. What the city receives, in return, is congestion concentrated into a few hours.

None of this means that ships bring nothing. In ports where the season is short, a ship's arrival can fill restaurants and shops during weeks that would otherwise be quiet, and crews and passengers do buy locally. Some ports have built their waterfronts around the trade and would struggle without it. The argument, therefore, is not whether cruise tourism has benefits, but whether the benefits justify the costs at the scale now proposed. Here the industry's own forecasts are important, because the ships on order will add capacity rather than replace it.

The industry replies that its ships are becoming cleaner. LNG-powered ships emit far less sulphur and particulate matter than oil-fired ones, although they still produce carbon dioxide and leak methane, and an increasing number can shut down their engines alongside and draw power from the shore. The last of these is genuinely effective, but only where a port has installed the necessary equipment and where the ship is built to connect to it. Most ports have not. The 2020 limit on the sulphur content of marine fuel, and the stricter rules that now apply in the Mediterranean, have also reduced emissions considerably.

Cities have not waited for a global solution. Dubrovnik, whose walled centre is small enough to be measured in hectares, now allows no more than two ships in port at any one time. Venice has closed its historic waterway to the largest vessels. Amsterdam has backed a plan to move its cruise terminal away from the city centre by the middle of the next decade. The Greek island of Santorini has announced a daily ceiling on cruise visitors.

Limits of this kind are easy to announce and harder to justify. A cap on the number of ships does not by itself make the ships that do come any cleaner. It may even make matters worse if the berths are auctioned and the largest, most polluting vessels win them. Because an operator can move a ship to a neighbouring port within a season, a limit imposed in one city can transfer the pressure to the next bay along the coast. That is why ports are reluctant to act alone. Nor should a cap be confused with a plan: a city that admits two ships a day has said nothing about when they arrive, where their passengers go, or how they reach the centre.

What, then, should a city do? It has an undoubted right to decide how many ships may use its port. The residents of a small historic centre have a stronger claim on its streets than visitors who spend a few hours there. But the number of ships is a crude proxy for the damage they cause. A better policy would charge for the berth, and charge more for a dirtier ship, and require shore power where it can be installed. It would spread arrivals across the day and the year, and treat any ceiling on numbers as one instrument among several rather than as a solution in itself. Cities that count ships without measuring what those ships cost them are answering the easiest question rather than the important one.