PART OF THIS VISIT TO TURKEY IS A TRAVEL EXPERIMENT to test our hypothesis — that it is better to endure the cold desolation of off-season travel than to compete with the tourist hoards of summer. There are many new places we want to see but there are enough sites to revisit to act as experimental controls. The weather won’t be the only thing that’s changed since 2007; Turkey must be a different place and we know we see things differently now.
Once the Air Serbia flight dropped us at Attaturk Airport it didn’t take long to recall how aggressive Turkish drivers are but I don’t remember there being so many of them — traffic around Istanbul was ridiculous. We were pleasantly surprised to find that our GPS, Sir Clive, is programmed for Turkey, which should help reduce the driving stress levels.
We decided to save Istanbul for the end of the trip and drove 240 km around the Sea of Marmara to Bursa and the Tiara Hotel and Spa. The owner, Murat, treated us like long-lost family, probably because he used to live in the US. Every morning he gave us a list of places to visit, upgraded our room and is even arranging a “special deal” on a carpet. And he told us that the veiled Muslim women we have been seeing are Malaysian and Indonesians adding some sightseeing to their Haj trip to Mecca.
Hi steppin' on Cumalikizik's cobbles
We hadn’t been to this side of the Sea before and wanted to start slowly using Bursa, Turkey’s first capital, as a base. We will visit the obligatory mosques and tombs just to be sociable but, absent Roman ruins, we were more interested in the old Ottoman towns. The village of Cumalikizik was abandoned for a century after the capital moved from Bursa and is now a World Heritage site. Except for the stalls selling tourist junk, it looks much like it would have during Ottoman times. The rough cobbled streets are certainly original with water from today’s rain draining down the center.
Muslim women on "Haj" explore Cumalikizik
Our next stop was ithe “Green Tower” or Yesil Turbe, the icon of Bursa. It was originally covered in green Iznik tiles which were destroyed in an earthquake, only to be replaced by blue tiles. Go figure. A local guy, Kurdish actually, named Yunus chatted us up. He is an artist currently renovating the hammam (bathhouse) next to the tower. He invited us in for tea and the low-key sales pitch — You don’t have to buy anything, just look — for his carpets. We might have returned on Saturday for another look but the weather was terrible.
Yunus of many talents
