Long before antique dealers set up shop in the winding streets of Istanbul's historic bazaar districts, a guild of wanderers known as "arayıcılar" roamed the city's neighborhoods, baskets strapped to their backs, calling out for unwanted goods.

The word translates roughly as "seekers" or "searchers," and their trade, documented in Ottoman records dating back centuries, bears a striking resemblance to what collectors and dealers do today.

"If I had been doing this profession 300 years ago, you would not have invited me as an antique dealer," Hamza Demirkapu, an Istanbul-based antiques expert, said in a recent exclusive interview to Daily Sabah. "You would have invited me as an arayıcı."

According to Demirkapu, the guild numbered around 500 members in Istanbul alone and appears in some of the most significant texts of Ottoman urban history, including the 17th-century travel writings of the Ottoman Turkish explorer Evliya Çelebi and the late historian Reşat Ekrem Koçu's encyclopedic account of Istanbul. Some historians considered the arayıcılar sanitation workers. Others, Demirkapu argues, got it right: they were the antique dealers of their era.

Their method was systematic. They moved street by street through different neighborhoods, collecting items residents no longer needed. At the end of each circuit, they descended to the shores of Yenikapı, where they maintained a small quay. There they sorted through the haul, setting aside silver, manuscripts, or anything else they judged sellable. The rest went into the sea.

The guild paid fees to the local "qadi", the Ottoman judicial and administrative authority, calibrated to the economic conditions of each neighborhood they worked. Traces of their existence survive in qadi court records into the late 18th century.

The parallel Demirkapu draws is not merely historical curiosity. It points to something more fundamental about Istanbul's relationship with objects, memory and commerce, a relationship that is being renegotiated in real time.

How online auctions changed the market

The past several years have transformed the antique trade in Türkiye, accelerating changes that were already underway. The internet began shifting how buyers and sellers found each other. Then the pandemic broke the market open in unexpected ways. Collectors who had spent decades building their holdings suddenly liquidated them. Others, stuck at home and newly attentive to the objects around them, decided to start buying.

"An unbelievable collector cleared out his collection during the pandemic," Demirkapu said. "That stirred up the market. And some people said, well, let's buy these."

Instagram became an unlikely but central venue. Online auctions proliferated. Demirkapu describes a market that nobody had anticipated, one in which people were simultaneously buying, selling, losing money and learning from the loss.

What changed most was who was participating. Antiques had long carried the aura of wealth and exclusivity, the domain of people with deep pockets and specialist knowledge. Social media undermined that perception. People saw that an antique teacup might cost the equivalent of a few dollars, or a few hundred, or a few thousand. The entry point was visible in a way it had not been before.

"People started gathering small collections based on their budgets," Demirkapu said. "When people hear the word collection, they get a little scared, as if a collection can only be made from million-dollar pieces."

Everything is collectible

Demirkapu pushes back on that assumption, speaking with obvious admiration for collectors who specialize in napkins, chewing gum wrappers or early mobile phones. In each case, he argues, the discipline required is genuine and the knowledge accumulated is real. A serious napkin collector, he suggests, has internalized the history of gastronomy, paper manufacturing and graphic design. Someone who can date a napkin to 1970s Belgium by its typeface and motifs has done meaningful intellectual work.

The word he reaches for to explain the underlying impulse is nostalgia, though he uses it in its original clinical sense. The term was coined around 1650 by a Swiss physician diagnosing Swiss mercenary soldiers fighting in France. They presented with nausea, dizziness and fatigue. The doctor concluded the illness was psychological, a longing for home, and named it nostalgia, from the Greek words for homecoming and pain.

"The disease of the person who collects chewing gum is also nostalgia," Demirkapu said. "The man looks at a piece of gum and thinks about being eight years old, his dreams, his parents."

The observation carries a weight beyond sentimentality. In a city where 300 years of collecting culture runs from Ottoman quaysides to Instagram live auctions, the collecting culture that once sustained the arayıcılar continues today in antique shops, online auctions and private collections, linking Istanbul's past to its rapidly changing present.