Cumalıkızık Village

About this place

Some of Cumalıkızık's lanes are only sixty centimetres wide, which is why no car has ever driven through them, and that in turn is why the village looks much as it did seven hundred years ago. It was founded as an Ottoman waqf settlement in the early fourteenth century on the northern foot of Uludağ, roughly eleven kilometres east of central Bursa, and some 270 protected houses survive, around 180 of them still lived in. They rise two or three storeys on chestnut and oak frames with walls of stone and adobe, painted ochre, blue, white and mauve, their upper floors jutting out over the lane until they almost touch, their ground floors windowless for privacy. In 2014 UNESCO listed the village together with Bursa's bazaar quarter and sultans' complexes as one site: 'Bursa and Cumalıkızık: the Birth of the Ottoman Empire'. In truth most people come now not for the history but for breakfast. The courtyards of the old houses have become restaurants serving the sprawling Turkish serpme kahvaltı in dozens of little dishes: village cheeses, olives, eggs with sucuk, honey with clotted cream, and the raspberry and chestnut jams the area is known for, alongside gözleme rolled and griddled in front of you. The square has stalls of preserves, dried fruit and handicrafts, and close by are the village's Ottoman mosque, whose origins go back to 1396, a small Ottoman hammam and a modest municipal ethnography museum, opened in 2014, on seven centuries of village life. The lanes themselves take an hour at most; the rest of your visit is spent at a table. Getting there: by car along the Ankara road it is about twenty minutes from central Bursa, and you leave the car at the car park by the village entrance since the lanes are closed to traffic. Otherwise take the BursaRay metro on the Kestel line to Cumalıkızık-Değirmenönü station (a single fare is 40 TRY in 2026), then a minibus or taxi for the few minutes uphill to the village, or a direct taxi in twenty to twenty-five minutes. The cobbles are steep in many places and split by open drainage channels, so a pushchair is more burden than help; a baby carrier and comfortable shoes for everyone are the answer. Timing is everything. On weekends and public holidays the village fills until walking a metre-wide lane becomes a contest, and breakfast tables are gone by ten in the morning unless booked, so come on a weekday or early on a Saturday. In summer the heat is bearable thanks to the shade of the walls and the village's slight elevation above the city; in winter snow occasionally settles on the tiled roofs and the picture is lovelier still, though the stones turn slippery. Signs and menus are mostly in Turkish, but breakfast needs no translation.