Daddy Cheese

When I first visited Turkey in 2004 Sabhia Gokcen (named after the world's first female combat pilot) airport was brand new.  It had few flights in and out and if you missed the bus that came to meet each one you were out of luck and had to take a taxi the 30km west to central Istanbul.  At the time I personally claimed it as the most inconvenient airport in the world. It would, no doubt, have surprised my former self that we were pleased to be flying into SG from Cyprus.  Partly because it's become much busier and transport has become correspondingly easier. And partly because we weren't actually heading west to central Istanbul, but going still further east to Eskisehir.

We took a regular old city bus to the high speed train station about 5km to the southwest.  The trains are inexpensive and popular so we actually had to wait a couple of hours for the next one with free seats, during which we went and had a yummy brunch of menemen in the busy seaside suburb of Pendik and were very warmly welcomed (back) to Turkey by lots of people, including the restaurant owners, both of whom had studied in Eskisehir. 

The train twiddled and twaddled around Istanbul but once we were around the big city got up to 250km/h.

Eskisehir is called "the miracle on the steppes," and "the Venice of Anatolia".  These are clearly fairly large exaggerations. But that doesn't mean that it isn't a very pleasant city.  It has one big river and a single canal that wend their way through two state Universities. It's got a pleasant, if not spectacular old town full of old Ottoman houses and cafes.  And it's got a glass blowing museum and workshop which, rather to our surprise, we really enjoyed. We actually say there and watched while the two guys working there made a beautiful bowl over about ninety minutes.

As with Trabzon on our last trip to Turkey and Afyonkarahisar on the one before that, Eskisehir was just a typical small Turkish city without any particularly remarkable attractions, but that provided a pleasant and relaxing setting to see a bit of daily life.

We left Eskisehir on the high speed train again.  One downside to such quick modes of transportation is that stops can be very quick, even if they're fairly far apart.  So somehow we managed to get off one stop early. We'd already planned a day of Dolmus hopping, so this just added one more hop to the day.

Osmaneli and Iznik are a small and a medium-sized town in the heart of old Ottoman Turkey.  In Osmaneli, we hopped off the dolmus, and took a nice walk through the sixteenth and seventeenth century houses and silk factories (they actually bred silkworms).  Before leaving we sat and had a çay (tea) in Osmaneli and met a very well travelled gentleman who had been a merchant mariner in his younger days, travelling everywhere from London to Indonesia and back before returning home to settle down in his old home.

Iznik, meanwhile, is bigger and receives many more tourists than Osmaneli.  Turks are interested in the place as it was an important early Ottoman imperial fort and also where the finest examples of imperial ceramic work came from.  This includes the thousands and thousands of tiles that decorate Sultanahmet Camii (the Blue Mosque) and the other Imperial mosques in Istanbul.

Christians are interested in the place because in Byzantine days it was known as Nicea and hosted two major church councils at one of which the Nicene Creed was agreed upon.  As this happened a loooong time ago, even before the great Schism that separated the Catholic and Orthodox churches, pretty much every Christian in the world can trace their church doctrine back to Iznik (and in particular, to the Church of Saint Sophia [Aya Sofia] which, after spending decades as a museum, was returned to use as a functioning mosque recently, much to the consternation of some Christians).

There are a bunch of other interesting historical relics.  The city walls, which were constructed, patched and rebuilt by everyone from the Romans to the Byzantines to the Seljuks to the Ottomans.  And the green mosque, decorated with the city's namesake tiles.

But most importantly, there was Daddy Cheese.  Baba Peynirci (which is the literal translation) is a chain of deli type shops that we first discovered in Iznik.  We bought olives, walnut-fudge-halvah stuff, mixed pickled veggies. And of course, cheese. We were well aware that Turkey's beyaz peynir ("white cheese," somewhat reminiscent of feta) was good.  But we hadn't quite realized that Turkey produces loads of other good cheeses too, ranging from kurut (the rock hard, salty-sour dried yoghurt stuff popular in central Asia), others that resembled smoked mozzarella and gruyere, and perhaps most unusual, a sort of stringy cheese-floss made from a cheese with plenty of blue mould and blue cheese flavour.  We did a lot of picnic shopping at Cheese Daddies over our remaining week or so in Turkey.

Our penultimate destination in Turkey was (another!) major historical centre of the early Ottomans.  The area around the Sea of Marmara is just packed with them. But Bursa is arguably the grandest.

Bursa reminded me a bit of Kyoto.  In that it's a former capital (it was the first actual city conquered by the Ottomans, and their first real capital) that is a large modern city, but is dotted and dabbed with fabulous historical monuments throughout.  It seemed like everywhere you went there was a pretty old mosque (even moreso than in Istanbul, which is saying something).

And then there are the first Ottoman imperial mosques, of which Ulu Camii (the Great Mosque) and Yeşil Camii (the Green Mosque) are merely the two most impressive.  There is a big covered bazaar, not quite as flashy as Istanbul's, but unlike in IST's Grand Bazaar, it's virtually all dedicated to local commerce. We didn't have a single person offer to sell us a carpet in Bursa.  In amongst the bazaar are lovely little caravanserais (Hans as they are called in Turkey), many of which are now very pleasant (and surprisingly reasonably priced) tea gardens, all abustle with shoppers taking a break.

And as if all of these weren't enough, even though the original Ottoman sultans moved their capital onwards in just a few generation, it continued to hold great significance to them, such that the first six sultans and a miscellany of their wives, sons, daughters, aunts and uncles were buried there.  The beautiful blue tomb and the huge tomb complex in the north of the city show off some of the best tilework and painting of the era.

Meanwhile, up above Bursa is Uludag, a 2000m+ peak with ski lifts up top.  We climbed up the slopes a fair way along a street that probably gives Dunedin's Baldwin street a serious run for it's money, and once in the high, surprisingly isolated little suburbs we sat and listened to the dozens of echoing, swirling calls to prayer.  As I've commented before in this blog, I quite like the Turkish version of the call to prayer. Turkey is one of the relatively few places where it's almost always done live by a real muezzin instead of a recording. But I must say that since our last visit, the trend in muezzin styles seems to have taken steps beyond embellished and impassioned into the range of just over-doing it.  Now it seems like every word must be sung with at least four or five different notes, to the point that many practitioners sound like they're trying to emulate Mariah Carey!

We thoroughly enjoyed all of this, but perhaps the very best part of Bursa waited til our final day. We changed accommodation, moving out to a (for us at least) splendidly fancy boutique hotel in the suburb of Cekirge.  

It's no secret that the Turks love their public baths, and Bursa has historically had some of the grandest, as it's gone to a series of natural hot springs.  Sarah and I each picked out one ancient Hamam to visit on our final evening. I went to the Yeni Kaplice (the "New" bath, a name which, as we're in Turkey, was entirely relative, as the place dated from 1555), while Sarah went to the Keçeli Hamam which, while having been renovated more recently, was almost a full century older than mine.

I was expecting such a venerable institution to be a major tourist attraction, but it seemed like I was the only non-local (definitely the only non-Turk) there.  I had a lovely long soak in the main pool, which was large enough and deep enough to swim in. I sat beneath a marble lion's head that poured 45°C water out of its mouth over my head and back (though even at this temperature it was still mixed waaaay down, as the spring that feeds the Hamam comes out of the ground at 84°C).  I had a nice conversation in very broken German with a Turkish man who informed me that Erdogan, Trump and Putin are all Schweins. And when it came time to leave, I was fetched a cup of tea, fresh towels (yes, towels… one for the body, one for my long hair) and patted dry by the very friendly and helpful attendant out in the grandiose dark wood lobby of the place.

Walking home on a cold November night after a hot, steamy bath is a wonderful sensation.  I'm not sure if Sarah had quite as much fun as I did, but it was a great way to finish off our visit to Bursa and prepare for our relaxed return to one of my favourite cities in the world, Istanbul.