Within the historical quarters of Istanbul, in the district of Eminonu, lies the Istanbul Grand Bazaar. With its foundation nearly coinciding with the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in the 15th century, the Istanbul Grand Bazaar stands as the oldest and largest covered market in the world. With over 3000 shops selling a wide variety of goods, the commerce of carpets and kilims remains one of the Bazaar's oldest and most iconic trades. The remarkable resilience of this trade, a core activity in the Bazaar, encapsulates traces of the multiple challenges faced by Turkey – and the region – across the centuries. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research conducted among carpet sellers within the Istanbul Grand Bazaar, and on radical cartography, this paper focuses on the everyday dimension of the negotiation of rugs whose trajectories professedly start in remote locations of Anatolia and, mediated by carpet sellers in the Bazaar, find their way into homes, collections, and galleries all over the world. Engaging with the notion of ‘relative location’ (Green, 2016), the paper explores how carpet sellers, their respective customers, and formal and informal regulations around this trade resort to selectively (dis)connecting Turkey from temporalities and spaces/contexts as a strategy to calibrate the value of the rugs being sold. In other words, while a rug derives its economic value from its temporal (for instance, age) and spatial (dis)connections (for instance, place of origin), that economic value is always enabled by the politics of evoking, concealing or blurring boundaries and borders, i.e. by the scaling up or down of proximity and distance between Turkey and other contexts. Finally, the paper suggests that combined efforts between cartographic and ethnographic methods applied to an analysis of temporal-spatialities – in this case, grounded in the Bazaar’s carpet trade - stand as a productive platform from where to recast ‘location’ as a power-inflected category and ‘locating’, as a power-wielding act.