Flea Market University

Hello. A good flea market isn't junk spread out on folding tables. It's a museum with no labels, where the exhibits don't sit behind glass — they change hands — and the curator isn't an art historian but a dealer who has no real idea where the thing came from, but knows exactly what it's worth.

Start in London. Where Portobello Road market stands today, back in seventeen forty there was just an ordinary farm. The market itself appeared roughly a century later, and at first it sold meat, vegetables and fruit — nothing romantic about it. The antique dealers only moved in during the nineteen-forties and fifties, and from that point on Portobello became what it's known for now: a Saturday antiques market stretching over three kilometres of stalls, stands and shopfronts, counted among the largest antique markets on the planet.

Paris answers with something just as impressive. The Saint-Ouen flea market on the city's northern edge has a history stretching back almost two centuries, to the early eighteen hundreds, when ragpickers gathered outside the city walls — known as "fishermen of the moon" because they sold what they'd scavenged from the rubbish heaps at night. Today Saint-Ouen covers about seven hectares, split into several dozen smaller markets, and draws millions of visitors a year. It's often called the largest antiques and secondhand market in the world — and wandering its narrow lanes, that's easy to believe.

And now, one closer to home for the storyteller — Udelka, in Saint Petersburg, officially the Udelny market. Its story goes back to the eighteen-seventies, when the Udelnaya railway station was built and people from the surrounding villages started bringing their goods straight to the arriving trains. Secondhand trading here dates back to the nineteen-twenties, and it never really stopped — not even in Soviet times, when this kind of trade was technically against the law. The market found its current shape at the turn of the nineteen-eighties into the nineties, when private trading finally became legal. And the reputation that followed was serious: international publications rank Udelka among the world's best flea markets, alongside London and Berlin. The stalls stretch for two kilometres, and by some estimates as many as a million objects are laid out across them. It's sometimes called the largest open-air museum of Soviet everyday life — the place to find enamel badges, faceted glass tumblers, vinyl records, old postcards, and things you'd probably forgotten even existed.

And here's what ties all three markets together, for all their differences in accent and currency: each one is a living archive of its city. A museum hands you the story ready-made, printed on a little card. A flea market makes you work it out yourself — from the object in your hands, from the wear on its surface, from the price a dealer named without ever suspecting he was holding a small fragment of somebody else's past life. That, really, is the university in question — except here the lectures are haggling, and the diploma is the thing you carry home.

The world is enormous and one question is enough to start. moygid dot online.