In most Eastern towns the Jewish quarters, containing the fish, meat, and vegetable markets, are the most unclean, and consequently the most unhealthy. Few sanitary regulations exist, and little attention is paid to them or to the laws of hygiene. The streets are frequently nearly impassable, and some of the dwellings of the poor are pestilential, the hotbeds of every epidemic that visits the country. Most of the ancient khans, warehouses, and bazars at Stamboul, and in large provincial towns, are fine solidly constructed edifices. The bazars are of a peculiarly Oriental style of architecture, and appear well adapted to the use for which they were designed—the display and sale of goods. In the interior, however, many of these bazars are neglected, and some left to decay have been by degrees abandoned by the tenants of the innumerable shops they once contained. The _charshi_, or market-place, consists of an incongruous assemblage of shops, huddled together without any attempt at architecture or regard to appearances; for the most part protected only by large shutters that are raised in the morning and lowered at night. A low platform of boards occupies the greater part of the interior, in the front corner of which the shopkeeper sits on a little carpet, cross-legged, with a wooden safe by his side and his account-book and pipe within easy reach, ever ready to attend to the wants of his customers. Rows of shelves, constructed in recesses in the walls, serve as receptacles for his goods. The _khans_, or warehouses, in towns are used as deposits for merchandise and for the transaction of business by merchants and bankers who have offices in them. A series of hostelries of all descriptions and dimensions, also called khans, some built of stone and others of timber, exist in large numbers in all parts of the country, serving as hotels to travellers and store-rooms for merchandise during transit. The ruins of the most ancient of these, built by the Turks at the time of the conquest, and used by them as blockhouses, still exist on the main roads and in some of the principal towns. By the side of these substantial stone buildings have arisen a number of miserable edifices dignified with the name of khan, with whose discomforts the weary traveller too often makes sad acquaintance.