Bursa was the first great capital of the Ottomans, taken in 1326 and held for over a century before the court moved to Edirne, and the Muradiye district is where the sultans of that period are buried. The complex was begun in 1426 by Sultan Murad II, a mosque with a medrese and a garden, and around it are a dozen or so tombs of sultans and their families, set among cypress trees and roses. The tombs are plain from outside and surprisingly lovely inside, with painted ceilings, tiled walls and a row of simple sarcophagi. One of them holds the sons of Mehmed the Conqueror, and the stories of the princes buried here, some of them victims of palace power struggles, have their own sad drama.
The old city lies on the lower slopes of Uludağ, the mountain the ancients called Mount Olympus of Mysia, which rises behind it to over 2,500 metres and holds snow into late spring. Bursa is known for silk, and the Koza Han, a caravanserai from the fifteenth century, still has silk merchants in its courtyard. The Green Mosque and tomb, with their blue-green tiles, and the Ulu Cami, a vast mosque with twenty domes, are close by. Food matters here too. The İskender kebab, sliced lamb on bread with tomato sauce and butter, was invented in the city, and the candied chestnuts, kestane şekeri, are sold in every shop.
The riding is the bonus. From the city the road to the ski resort on Uludağ climbs in long hairpins through forest of beech and fir, rising some 1,500 metres in a few dozen kilometres, with a clean and well-kept surface. The upper reaches are often in cloud, the air at the top is cold even in summer, and snow closes the road in winter or requires chains. Below the city, the plain of Bursa is rich with orchards and mulberry trees, and traffic into and around the city can be heavy, with trucks and buses on the main roads.
Bursa has more than a million people, and so fuel, repairs and food are simple. Cumalıkızık, an Ottoman village with cobbled lanes, lies a short ride to the east and is a pleasant stop for breakfast.