1. A market consisting of a street lined with shops and stalls, especially one in the Middle East.
2. A shop or a part of a store in which miscellaneous articles are sold.
3. A fair or sale at which miscellaneous articles are sold, often for charitable purposes.
[Italian bazarro and Urdu bzr, both from Persian; see wes-3 in Indo-European roots.]

We explored the idea of naming our Festivus market a bazaar back in 2002 as we were designing its structure. We had planned on inviting churches, immigrant organizations and entrepreneurs with ties to their home culture to sell during the holiday months. Instead we focused on the artists who were doing more New Orleans cultural gifts and recycled material products along with fair trade items. After five years of Festivus, we decided as an organization that we had concluded that pilot. There is a Greenpaper on our website over at marketumbrella.org (under the marketshare tab) if you want to read about what we learned from Festivus. I do know we felt honored to work with the artisans that do so much to create a vibrant culture along with our farmers and fishers.

As we continue to create a typology for markets in our evaluation suite of tools (SEED and Market Portrait now, NEED and FEED soon), I am back to thinking about where a bazaar fits in the public market arena. Seems the words miscellaneous and/or cultural displays are key to its description…Love to hear from any of you if you have used it to describe your market and why.