The Kapalıçarşı — the Grand Bazaar — is a roofed city of more than sixty alleys and four thousand stalls, and from May through September the temperature inside it is the temperature most people in Istanbul would prefer. It is the obvious shade. What is less obvious is that the entire historic peninsula was, in its sixteenth-century planning, organized around large shaded courtyards: the avlular of the great Sinan mosques, the colonnaded inner squares of the medreses, the han structures where caravans unloaded. The Süleymaniye complex alone has five courtyards in a row, each with cypress and plane shade, each connected to the next by a colonnade. You can walk from the Hippodrome to the bazaar almost entirely under cover if you know the order.
The picks below string those covers. Each one is short — the historic peninsula is a small place, denser than its tourist scale suggests — and they assume you are willing to enter a mosque courtyard, which is free and welcomed outside prayer times. Take your shoes off if you go inside; in the courtyards proper you don’t need to. A practical note: the Mahmutpaşa stairs that drop from the bazaar down toward Eminönü are partly covered by awnings and partly not. We route around the open sections.