This is one of those specialities that sounds simple until you taste it. Chestnuts are naturally earthy and soft, and candying them gives a gentle sweetness without losing the original texture.
I visit a producer whose family has been making them for generations. They explain the process — bringing chestnuts in from villages, peeling them, freezing them to manage production, then candying and packaging them. There are even chocolate-coated versions.
The result is exactly what you’d hope: the real chestnut flavour is still there, but with a clean sweetness that makes it feel like a proper local gift — something people genuinely bring home from Bursa, not just something made for visitors.
The next morning, I follow another local recommendation that I keep hearing again and again: tahinli pide.
This is a bakery speciality made with tahini — sesame paste — spread into dough and baked until it turns fragrant, slightly sweet, and deeply comforting.
It’s the kind of food that makes sense in a city where bakeries are part of everyday life: early mornings, warm ovens, regular customers, and traditions that don’t need explanation because they’ve never stopped.
And with breakfast sorted, I head to a local farmers’ market in the city centre.
Markets in Türkiye are more than shopping. They’re how you see what grows locally, what’s in season, and what people actually cook at home.
They’re also where you feel the pace of the city — bargaining, conversation, small routines repeated week after week.
Here, I’m joined by Adil, a wellness chef and nutrition-focused food writer who was born in Bursa. He explains something that’s easy to forget if you think of Turkish food only in terms of a few well-known dishes: Türkiye has enormous regional variety.
The Aegean region of Türkiye is famous for herbs, olive oil, vegetables, and lighter cooking. Eastern regions are more associated with meat, spices, and richer dishes.
And Bursa, sitting close to the sea but also near mountains, benefits from both worlds — fertile land, strong produce, and seasonal specialities like peaches when the timing is right.
Later, Adil takes me for dinner and uses the meal to show how Turkish food often works: lots of small plates, lots of colour, and a balance of textures and ingredients.
We start with artichokes and fennel topped with caramelised onions — a dish that leans Aegean in spirit. There are herb salads, peppers, and plates that use simple ingredients but keep the flavours distinct.
Adil points out the obvious but important principle: the more colour you see on the table, the more likely you’re eating a wider range of nutrients. Turkish cuisine, at its best, does this naturally — not as a wellness trend, but as a normal way of eating.
And that’s the point. Food here isn’t just delicious. It’s cultural knowledge — built over generations, shaped by geography, and still deeply connected to local farming.
Iznik calling
From Bursa, I head east toward another place with extraordinary historical weight: Iznik.
On the surface, Iznik looks like a small town by a lake. But historically, it’s one of the most layered places in Türkiye.
Known in antiquity as Nicaea, it witnessed Roman planning, Byzantine power, and later Ottoman influence. It’s a place where empires rose, struggled, and left traces that still sit side by side.
I meet a history professor, Luca Zavagno, who begins by showing me one of the key entrances — the Istanbul Gate, part of the city’s fortifications.
He explains how the urban layout was designed around major intersecting roads, built in the Roman period, and later incorporated into defensive walls.
Those walls, first built in the late 3rd century, were repaired and rebuilt repeatedly over centuries — after wars, earthquakes, and political shifts.
One especially dramatic chapter came after the Fourth Crusade in 1204, when Istanbul was taken and the Byzantine capital moved to Nicaea for a period.
That kind of history is hard to imagine when you’re standing in a quiet town, but Iznik holds it in its stonework.
We also visit the remains of a lakeside basilica, an early Christian church discovered in the 2010s after water levels receded. It had been submerged for centuries.
Scholars believe it may be connected to early Christian history in the city — a reminder that Iznik was an important centre of religious debate and authority in late antiquity.
Finally, we step into the Roman theatre — a structure that, in many ways, summarises the city’s long timeline. A Roman entertainment space that later included a Christian chapel, and later still became a place where debris accumulated and burials were made.
In a town like Iznik, history isn’t one story. It’s many stories layered on top of each other — Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman — sometimes clearly visible, sometimes difficult to separate, but always present.
And that’s what makes travelling in Türkiye so consistently surprising. You arrive expecting one thing — a city, a market, a meal — and you leave with a much deeper sense of how places carry time.
Bursa shows you a country building its future through industry and design, while still living inside Ottoman-era streets and trade routes. Iznik reminds you that even small towns can sit at the crossroads of world history.
And once you start noticing that, you can’t really stop.
So… where to next?
