Teze Bazaar — Yeni Bazaar, the "new bazaar," though it has been here for decades — is Baku's main food market, a few blocks north of the centre near the Nizami Cinema. It's an old-style market: rows of stalls selling fresh pomegranates piled in red pyramids, dried fruit and walnuts, every imaginable kind of nut, jars of honey, sacks of spices, butchered meat, and live carp swimming in plastic tanks.
This is where to buy things to take home — Azerbaijani saffron, sumac, dried persimmons, the small dark walnuts soaked in syrup. Bargaining is expected, mildly. The market is busy and at its most photogenic in the morning before about eleven. Behind it sprawls a less polished area of secondhand and household goods worth a wander.