Cumalıkızık is a small village about ten kilometres from Bursa, yet it shares World Heritage status with the city. Its historical significance lies in the fact that it is the last surviving piece of an economic system that once made Bursa – the first capital of the Ottoman Empire – flourish.
The Turks captured the city in 1326, and the first six sultans expanded the future empire from here. In the city itself, each of them built a külliye – a mosque-school-bathhouse-kitchen complex – which naturally attracted residents and shaped new neighbourhoods around them. Each külliye was endowed with a vakıf, a bundle of properties intended to fund the upkeep of the complex. One such endowment included the five Kızık villages – let’s call them the “Maiden Villages” – lying on the slopes of Mount Uludağ, the ancient Bithynian Olympus, just outside Bursa. Among them Cumalıkızık – perhaps “Friday Maiden Village” or “Blessed Maiden Village” – likely served as the site of the shared Friday mosque. The taxes from these villages supported the Orhan Gazi Külliye, the mosque complex of the second sultan. According to tradition, Hacivat and Karagöz, the two perennial heroes of the Turkish shadow puppet theatre, were labourers at the construction of the Orhan Gazi Külliye – which means they may well have been peasants brought in from one of these endowed villages, perhaps even from Cumalıkızık itself.
Karagöz performance
The best thing about Cumalıkızık is that it doesn’t look like a World Heritage village at all. Nothing is polished; there are no souvenir shops or boutique hotels crowding the streets, and no forty-seat tour buses trundling in – Bursa itself is already far off the radar of most foreign visitors. Cumalıkızık looks exactly like the mountain villages of my childhood in the Mátra or Székelyföld: winding streets with uneven paving or none at all, a stream running right down the centre of the main street, the occasional general store, and behind the mosque a kıraathane – the smoky, communal coffeehouse typical of Turkish neighbourhoods, complete with a little bubbling fountain on its terrace. The houses are classic Ottoman structures: stone on the ground floor, timber-framed and mud-walled on the upper storeys, jutting out on wooden consoles. The real miracle is how they managed – long before World Heritage status – to keep every old house standing, without allowing a single bland modern building to take its place.
And yet, in Cumalıkızık you never get the feeling that “time has stopped”, the way tourist brochures describe heritage villages kept in perfectly curated historical purity. Time hasn’t stopped here — it has simply slowed down a little. It’s obvious that real people live their everyday lives in these houses, with modern needs and routines. Wherever there’s room in front of a house, you’ll find a tractor that’s clearly in active use. In the tea garden — the other traditional institution of Turkish village life — portraits of actors and vintage film posters decorate the walls. From the mosque, people finishing their Ramadan recitation stroll down in puffer jackets and disappear between the lower houses.
The village shop’s selection reflects real, everyday needs — it could be any small store in Eastern Europe. Ildikó wants to buy a special Turkish chocolate for the kids, but the chocolate shelf mostly carries big multinational brands. “Fıstıklı çikolata var mı? Do you have pistachio chocolate?”, I ask, remembering the delicacy from Gaziantep. “Var, var,” the shopkeeper says proudly, pointing at a green-wrapped bar. I buy one for the group to try — and they immediately flood the shop and buy up the entire stock. Business done for the day.
The only signs of tourism are the blue tarpaulin-covered stalls on the main square and in front of a few houses. Even this is absolutely normal — it simply shows that this is a living village whose residents are happy to earn something from the modest, mostly domestic tourism brought by the World Heritage title.
At the moment, in late March, business is slow, so all stalls are still covered. Only when we circle back to the main square do we notice a woman who, hopeful after seeing our group, has untied the ropes. What appears under the tarpaulin is not the usual Chinese trinkets or patriotic souvenirs, but goods that truly belong to a place like this: homemade preserves — eggplant, hawthorn, apple, orange, green walnut. The large jars cost two euros, the small ones one. We significantly reduce her stock, too. As she pulls the tarpaulin back further, it’s as if she were drawing away the heavy clouds: the setting sun breaks through, casting jewel-like colors through the glass jars, just like the stained-glass windows of the mosque.
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