• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

East: the Ankara road. First stop Cumalıkızık,an untouched seven hundred-year-old Turcoman village minutes from Bursa: a lovely wander (avoid weekends). Spring water rushes down the streets, cooling the air and watering orchards. A few villagers rent rooms and offer delicious snacks. Next, Baba-sultan: no longer pretty, but the drive is. Baba Sultan, mounted on a deer, helped Orhan Gazi conquer Bursa and planted the tree in the citadel at Kavaklı Cami before going home to this lovely spot. No politics for him. His tomb is beside another giant plane. Over the door hang antlers. On to poor, ugly, bespoiled Inegöl. Beşer is the home of the Inegöl köfte, next to Ishak Pasha’s once-perfect mosque.

West: Gölyazı is a sleepy island village on Lake Uluabat. Further along is Issızhan caravansary. Another twenty minutes and you are in Karacabey, famous for its horses. Visit the fair (panayır) in May, full of lively gypsies. The lamb’s the thing, borne in on a spit, eaten with your fingers—no other meat compares. One last stop in spring: Lake Manyas—where ancient Persians built a paradise garden to watch the birds.

North: the coast road to Trilye (Zeytinbağı) winds through pretty olive groves—very slippery in the harvest season. Buy kilos of olives and eat fish by the harbor at Savarona. The road to Iznik via Yenişehir is also beautiful: soothing lake, lovely city walls, glorious sunsets.

When to go: any time but high summer. In bleak midwinter, heaven is tramping through the snow to a marrow-warming hamam. Getting there: by vapur to Yalova, or high-speed hızlı feribot to Mudanya (ido.com.tr). If driving from Istanbul, take the calming Eskihisar ferry to Yalova.

THE BATHS OF BURSA

The seventeenth-century Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi wrote that Bursa consisted purely of water. Springs, hot and cold, gushed out of the hillside, and they still do.

Before World War I, Bursa was the height of fashion. Each water had its peculiarity, and visitors spent weeks taking them in sequence. One governor found himself looking after the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, Prince Victor Napoleon, and Duke Carl Edward Saxe-Coburg in quick succession.

The two most famous baths are the Yeni Kaplıca (New Hot Springs) and the Eski Kaplıca (Old Hot Springs). The heavily renovated Eski Kaplıca is now virtually part of the luxury Kervansaray Hotel, and you are likely to have the place to yourself. On the other hand, the Yeni Kaplıca, barely changed since 1894, is bustling from dawn to dusk.

Some hotels in the Çekirge area still have their own springs and baths, from the plush, such as the Gönlüferah, to the delightfully old-fashioned, such as the Selvinaz, sadly threatened by developers.

Many other handsome hamams are dotted around the city, including the Timurtaş Paşa and the Mahkeme, which both heat their water—the latter using sawdust.

RECAPTURING OLD BURSA

With a population of over two million, Bursa has already been swamped by concrete. Fortunately, “Green” Bursa’s swan song coincided with the rise of photography. The Kent Müzesi (City Museum) always has interesting displays on the social history of the city, and several good albums of photographs have been published.

Bursa in the Ottoman Period, by Neslihan Türkün Dostoğlu (Akmed; in two volumes, in Turkish, French, and English), has images from the Suna and Inan Kıraç Collection and the Albert Khan Museum, Paris. Engin Özendeş’s Bursa: Osmanlı’nın Ilk Baskenti (Bursa: First Ottoman Capital) is a good collection of photos in paperback.

On the historical front, the birth of the Ottoman Empire is best explained in Heath Lowry’s Nature of the Early Ottoman Empire. His Ottoman Bursa in Travel Accounts uses untapped sources that historians have largely ignored. Osman’s Dream, by Caroline Finkel, is a good general history.

Devlet Ana (Mother State), Kemal Tahir’s classic saga set in the early Ottoman years, awaits translation. The only detailed guidebook to the area in English,