Things to do
9-
Cumalıkızık
An Ottoman village of about 270 timber and rubble houses on the lower slopes of Uludağ, founded as a waqf settlement in the fourteenth century and inhabited ever since. It is part of the World Heritage listing.
-
Grand Mosque
The mosque of 1399, twenty domes on twelve piers with an ablution fountain under the open central dome, and walls covered in monumental calligraphy by nineteenth-century masters. It is the largest early Ottoman mosque.
-
Bursa City Museum
The former courthouse of 1926, converted to tell the city's story from the Bithynian kings through the Ottoman century to the car factories. The silk and the Karagöz shadow theatre get their own rooms.
-
Green Mosque
The mosque of 1419 whose interior is faced in blue-green hexagonal tile made by craftsmen brought from Tabriz, with a sultan's loge above the entrance. It is the point where Ottoman architecture stops copying and starts inventing.
-
Green Tomb
The turquoise-tiled tomb of Mehmed the First, standing on the slope opposite its mosque and visible from most of the lower city. The sarcophagus inside is covered in the same Tabriz tile.
-
Karagöz Museum
A museum of the Turkish shadow theatre, whose two characters Karagöz and Hacivat are said to have been Bursa labourers, holding puppets, screens and a small performance space. Shows run at weekends.
-
Koza Han
The silk cocoon market of 1491, two storeys of arcades around a courtyard with a small mosque on piers in the middle, still selling silk and still the place the city drinks its tea. The cocoon auctions ran here into the twentieth century.
-
Muradiye Complex
A mosque, college and garden of twelve royal tombs built from 1426, holding the princes and mothers the dynasty buried away from Istanbul. The tombs are opened in rotation and the garden is the quietest place in Bursa.
-
Uludağ
The 2,543-metre mountain above the city, a national park in summer and Turkey's best-known ski area in winter, reached by a cable car that climbs from Teferrüç in about twenty minutes. Snow is reliable from late December to March.