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Looking through the glass office of his store in the Salipazari docklands of Istanbul, Kaya Duman watches two Russian traders talking to one of his shop assistants. They are standing among a bewildering array of cheap goods sanitary ware, leather jackets, bricks, torches, blankets, glass tableware and biscuits haggling over the price of plastic toilet seats.
"If Allah recreated the world and asked me to pick any square metre I wanted, I would still chose Turkey," Duman says. "This is one country where things are abundant and cheap. We are surrounded by countries and peoples who have little and who want to buy our goods. Especially the Russians. May it please God, they have nothing."
Salipazari, once mainly a berthing for luxury cruisers, is now an entrepôt for the huge Russian market across the Black Sea. In the windy streets behind the harbour the only shoppers are Russians who go from store to store drinking tea, bargaining, buying. The stores carry signs and advertisements in Russian. Many shop assistants are Russian-speaking Turkic men and women from neighbouring Ossetia and Daghestan, which most Turks did not know existed before the collapse of the Soviet Union.