Bedesten of Thessaloniki

The Bedesten of Thessaloniki sits as a low, rectangular stone building topped by six large lead-covered domes. Built in the fifteenth century by Sultan Murad the Second, it served as a textile market where merchants traded expensive silks and cottons. It anchored the commercial heart of the city for hundreds of years. In nineteen seventeen, the Great Thessaloniki Fire destroyed much of the neighborhood, but the thick walls and heavy lead roof of this market kept the interior intact while everything around it burned.