Life in an age of hyperinflation

On Saturday mornings, Istanbul’s markets and greengrocers are packed with housewives in search of a bargain. Anxious women compare cabbages while chefs haggle over bunches of parsley, passing across thick wads of ten Lira notes – equivalent to about £5 a decade ago, now worth just 50 pence. The rising cost of food has become a national obsession in Turkey. Menemen, a staple breakfast dish of scrambled eggs with tomato, onion and fried green peppers, has seen the cost of its basic ingredients shoot up by 132 per cent in a year.

Some shops in the big cities have invested in digital price tags – those little grey electronic screens you see in continental supermarkets that can be updated with the click of a mouse. But out in the countryside, most shop owners tot up the tab on the spot, increasing prices on an almost daily basis.

At a branch of one budget supermarket, a pack of beef sausages that were around 20 lira (around £1 at the time of writing) just a few months ago now cost 46.50,