Dad and I got on the 7:15am bus to Yalova… which was also the 7:15am school bus to Yalova. The bus was full o f teenagers and a few adults scattered around. There was standing room only when we got on, but one of the boys got up and offered me his seat and Dad ended up sitting on a raised hump between the first row of seats and the driver. There were three boys sitting up front with the driver, every seat was full, and there was a row of guys standing up and holding on as we wove our way through the mountains to Yalova. At one point we were going over an unpaved part of the road and dust came billowing in through the sunroof. Instead of just waiting for it to settle and driver just opened the side doors and let the air get out that way… with students standing in front of them. It was a hoot. Apparently there is no such thing as a free bus to school here. Students generally walk, no matter the age, or take the public buses to school. These students had a patch on their uniforms that I think indicated a technical school of some sort so I’m assuming it’s a specialty school that they commute an hour and pay 7TL to get to every day. It was an interesting trip.
Once in Yalova a guy who spoke a little English walked us to the area of the bus station where the Iznik bus was and took the time to get the time and point out the exact bus we were going to get on. Everyone has been so friendly and helpful, I just wish I could say people would get the same help if they were in New York City and unable to speak English. We had an hour to kill before the bus for Iznik left and the bus driver bought us a tea and we proceeded to carry on a conversation in French… in Turkey. He spent 7 years in France and loved it and I knew more French than Turkish so we had a very limited conversation. The trip to Iznik took an hour, exactly, and when we were going through the town the driver point out the good places to eat and where the main square of the city was. The bus returned to Yalova on the hour until around 8:00pm so we decided we would be able to get back in one day and started site seeing.
We got a little bit lost looking for our first destination but found an unexcavated Roman Theater instead. There was a path around it that someone told us to take to get to the water, where our destination was, and as we were walking there it was. There was a sign that said “Roman Theater” and that was it. It was great getting to see one that hasn’t been restored at all. The theater seems to be the first thing that gets restored in most of the ruins we’ve seen. This one has been spray painted and out of all the bad words the painters could’ve written they chose “seven day cash flow”. Amateurs. We continued around the theater and walked under part of the Roman wall that was built around Iznik. It was pretty impressive.
Our destination was the Iznik Education and Learning Foundation. Fodor’s said it was out of town along the water front, but a great place to see the tile-making process. We were shown to a showroom first, and I asked if we could have a tour of the workshop. Someone was called who spoke a little bit of English and we were taken up to where the tiles are actually made. This is half of the painting workshop. It was a huge, well lit room that had desks of college aged girls painting and tracing the tiles.
The tiles are made of soil with high levels of quartz so they are very durable. The patterns are traced onto a tracing paper and then little holes are made along the patter. Then a coal dust is used to transfer the pattern onto the blank tile. This girl was going over the coal dots with a coal paint to created a raised pattern and defined outline of the pattern.
The pattern is then “colored” with various paints made from oxides of minerals, for example the blue paint was cobalt oxide. The painters have examples of what colors go where and it’s essentially a paint by numbers with a very runny paint and very precise numbers. After the tiles are painted with the color they are covered in a layer of quartz and a special glaze and then put in the kiln.
The tiles come out bright and shiny after the firing process. It was fascinating to see the whole thing from start to finish. The handmade Iznik tiles start at around 40TL for a tile the size of a coaster and go up from there. Aside from being crafted by hand, the value comes in the durability and quality of the stone. They are ideal for decorating big spaces like the Blue Mosque or the bathroom in my next home.
I loved this mirror. Something told me a mirror half my size made of tile though wouldn’t quite fit the requirements for a 747 on the way home. A fun fact about the Iznik Education and Learning Foundation is that they made and presented tiles to the Queen of England. I’m not sure if she was in Turkey at the foundation or if someone flew out to England to present them, but there were big photographs of the event all over the showroom.
On our walk around the area we saw a small farm and I learned how an artichoke grows. I don’t care for them myself but my Dad loves them and the Turkish artichokes are huge. So now we know they grow from the ground up in a big bush.
We walked back to the main town along the lake. Iznik Lake is a huge freshwater lake with a beautiful waterfront. A lesson in geography: Iznik is inland about 37 miles from Yalova. It’s located on a freshwater lake and is a lovely town.
We visited the Iznik Museum after lunch (the museum was closed from noon – 1:00) and weren’t allowed to take photographs inside. The building itself used to be a soup kitchen which was built in 1388 by a wealthy Muslim as a demonstration of his charity. Inside were a collection of old ceramics, tiles, Greek tombstones, and Ottoman weaponry. It was a nice little museum.
The rose garden was really impressive. Huge rose bushes all in bloom. They didn’t smell like much but were beautiful. These weren’t actual graves but the headstones on display as part of the museum collection. I really liked the one with the fez on it and Dad liked the turbans.
Yesil Cami is a Seljuk style mosque across from the Iznik Museum. It’s known as the Green Mosque because of the color of the minaret, which is overlaid by blue and green tiles. The doors to the mosque were closed and we didn’t want to intrude on anything so we admired from the outside and sat on a park bench people watching for awhile.
We stopped at a few other tile shops on the way back to the bus stop and had time for a tea before getting on the bus back to Yalova. We made it to Yalova with about 30 minutes before the bus back to Esenkoy departed and was back in Esenkoy in time for dinner. Dad and I had a great time in Iznik and it was fun getting to see something a little bit different than the popular beaten path.
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