Edirne

The city was founded as Hadrianopolis by the emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century AD, on an older Thracian settlement where the Tunca and Meriç rivers join. Its position on the road between the Danube and Constantinople made it a permanent military prize: a great battle outside the walls in 378 destroyed a Roman army and killed the emperor Valens, and the town changed hands repeatedly during the Byzantine, Bulgarian and Crusader wars that followed.

The Ottomans took it in the 1360s, and for roughly ninety years Edirne was their capital. Sultans built the Old Mosque, the Üç Şerefeli and a palace on the river meadows, and Mehmed II set out from here in 1453 to besiege Constantinople. Even after the court moved, the city remained an imperial residence and hunting seat, and in 1575 Sinan, then in his eighties, completed the Selimiye Mosque, the building he himself considered his masterwork.

Decline came with war. Russian armies occupied the city in 1829 and 1878, and it was besieged and taken in the First Balkan War of 1912–13, then held briefly by Greece after the First World War before returning to Turkey under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, signed by delegates who travelled through its Karaağaç station. The population exchange and successive Balkan migrations remade the city's communities, its Jewish and Greek populations all but disappearing. Today Edirne is a provincial capital and university town on the edge of the European Union, with the Selimiye inscribed by UNESCO in 2011.

Kırkpınar shapes the city's self-image more than anything else. Held on the meadows at Sarayiçi in early summer, the tournament sets wrestlers in leather kispet breeches and slicked with olive oil against each other in a hierarchy of weights, with drums and pipes, ceremonial prayers and a chief wrestler crowned each year. Its organisers date the tournament to 1360, which the Guinness Book of World Records has counted as the world's oldest continuously sanctioned sporting competition.

Edirne is also a Balkan city in its manners and its music. Families here descend from migrants who arrived from Bulgaria, Greece and the former Yugoslavia over the past century and a half, and Roma communities in the riverside neighbourhoods keep a strong instrumental tradition; the Kakava and Hıdırellez celebrations in early May, with fires and processions, are among the most distinctive spring festivals in the country.

The craft tradition runs to soap moulded into fruits and vegetables, embroidered textiles, glass and the broom-making that once supplied the whole region, all sold in the covered markets. Students from the university fill the cafés of Saraçlar Street, and cross-border shoppers from Greece and Bulgaria give the centre a weekend bustle. Manners are conservative but easy, and the evening walk between the mosques and the pastry shops is a fixed part of the day.

About 180,000 people live in the city, with roughly 400,000 in the province, a population that has grown slowly compared with Turkey's larger centres. Trakya University brings tens of thousands of students, changing the rhythm of the streets between term and holiday.

The provincial economy is agricultural: sunflowers above all, along with wheat, rice on the river plains and dairy farming, with food processing, textiles and oil pressing in the industrial zones outside the city. The border crossings at Kapıkule and Pazarkule generate customs work, haulage and trade, and the flow of lorries between Turkey and Europe passes a few kilometres from the centre. Tourism is mostly Turkish and brief, with a rise in Greek and Bulgarian day visitors who come to shop and eat.

Life is small-town in scale. Mornings begin in the covered markets, offices and shops close for a long lunch, and evenings are spent on Saraçlar Street or in the tea gardens by the rivers. Winter fog and flooding on the Tunca and Meriç are recurring local worries, along with drought in the farming season, the state of the border traffic, and the drift of young people to Istanbul for work.

Edirne's dish is tava ciğer: calf's liver cut into very thin strips, dusted with flour and deep-fried until crisp, served with fried dried red peppers, raw onion with sumac and a squeeze of lemon. It is eaten at lunchtime in restaurants that cook nothing else, and it is the first thing residents recommend to a visitor. Around it sit the standard Thracian grills, köfte and bean stews of the lokantas.

The sweets are as well known. Badem ezmesi, a fine paste of ground almonds and sugar shaped into small cakes, is boxed and carried away by almost every visitor, and the old apothecary paste deva-i misk, flavoured with spices, is still sold in the same shops. Thrace's white brined cheese from Edirne's dairies is a breakfast staple across the country, and the city's markets sell it in blocks cut from the tin.

Drinks are local too. Hardaliye, unfermented grape juice steeped with mustard seed and sour cherry leaves, is a Thracian speciality drunk cold with meals. The province grows wine grapes, and the Thracian vineyards have been expanding for decades. In the markets there are also fruit-shaped decorative soaps that look edible but are not, a standing joke with new arrivals, sold beside the dried fruit and the halva.