
Bursa by Rail, the Historic Core with BursaRay and the T1
The most comfortable way to explore Bursa is never to think about a car at all.
Culture and arts guides, event recommendations and stories from the city.

The most comfortable way to explore Bursa is never to think about a car at all.

Bursa's silk has been talked about for centuries; the story of its wool is far shorter, yet every bit as decisive.

Anyone who sees Antalya for the first time from the sea or from a plane notices the same thing.

On Antalya's tourist map the Seljuks seem to amount to the Yivli Minaret in Kaleiçi.

In Antalya the tram belongs to three different eras.

Exploring Istanbul by bicycle sounds, at first glance, like an ambitious idea for a city famous for its hills. Yet the city's most beautiful places are on the shore, and the shore is flat.

A few metres beneath the floor you cross when you step off the Marmaray and walk to the metro at Yenikapı lies a harbour where, fifteen hundred years ago, grain ships from Egypt dropped anchor.

A city's name is its oldest monument. Stones fall, walls are repaired, streets are redrawn; but a name passes from mouth to mouth and lives for thousands of years, and every age adds its own colour to it.

In almost every language of the world the word "angora" suggests softness; you meet it on the label of a sweater, in the entry list of a cat show, in the name of a goat farm.

Look at the stone of Ankara, look at the tears in my eyes. The first line of a well-known folk song sets a city's stone beside love, and that is no accident.

To the north-west of İzmir, where Karşıyaka ends, the city suddenly opens onto salt pans, reed beds and shallow waters full of pink birds.

In the very centre of İzmir, between Alsancak and Basmane, lies a green island of 420,000 square metres.

Bursa has one more feature as famous as its silk and its kebab; the hot water that wells up from the foot of Uludağ.

Walking through Bursa's historic market, you pass a han named after silk, a bedesten filled with jewellers and shops with silk scarves hanging in their windows. This is no coincidence.

In Antalya, some summer nights belong not to people but to turtles.

Seen from above, the coast of the Teke Peninsula looks like a chain of coves, headlands and pine forests.

In Türkiye, calling a film a Yeşilçam film is often enough to say it is old. A black and white love story, a hard hearted rich man, a poor but proud young hero, a reunion at the end that has everyone in tears.

In old Istanbul the most dreaded news was news of a fire. For centuries the city was built of timber, its houses leaning into one another along narrow lanes.

2026 is a round-numbered year in the history of the Istanbul ferry: it marks 175 years since the founding of the Şirket-i Hayriye, the company set up to run steamers on the Bosphorus.

A short line that climbs from Karaköy to Beyoğlu in a minute and a half has been doing the same job for more than 150 years.

Topkapı Palace stands at the tip of the historic peninsula, on Sarayburnu, the point that looks over the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn at once.

In Istanbul, eating on the street is not about rushing a meal; it is a way of keeping pace with the city's calendar.

Reading the sign on an Istanbul ferry pier means speaking several languages without noticing it.

Most visitors to Topkapı Palace head straight for the Treasury, the Harem and the terrace over the Bosphorus. The row of chimneys rising along the right side of the Second Courtyard usually ends up as a single snapshot.