Eskişehir

The city's ancestor is Dorylaeum, whose mound, Şarhöyük, lies on the northern edge of the modern city. Settled from the Bronze Age and known to the Phrygians, it grew under Rome as a market town on the road from the Aegean into Anatolia and was valued for its thermal springs. It was here that the armies of the First Crusade fought a Seljuk force in 1097, and the town changed hands repeatedly in the wars between Byzantines and Turks before passing to the Ottomans at the end of the 13th century. The name Eskişehir simply means "old city".

Ottoman Eskişehir was a modest place of wood markets and meerschaum, the soft white stone dug from pits nearby and carved into pipes that reached European smokers. It changed decisively when the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway arrived in the 1890s: repair shops, then locomotive works, then aircraft maintenance made the town an industrial centre and drew migrants, among them Crimean Tatars and Balkan Muslims who settled quarters of their own.

It stood near the front line during the War of Independence and was fought over in 1921. The republic invested in its factories, and later in its universities: Anadolu University, founded in the 1950s and reorganised in 1982, became one of the largest institutions in the world through its open-education faculty. From the 1990s the municipality rebuilt the centre — pedestrian streets, tramways, parks, a cleaned and canalised Porsuk, and the restoration of Odunpazarı's timber houses — turning a workmanlike industrial city into one that Turks now visit for pleasure.

Eskişehir's reputation in Turkey is of a young, easy-going and liberal city, and it is a reputation carried mostly by its students, who number in the hundreds of thousands if the open-education registrations are counted. Term brings concerts, student theatre, cheap bars and crowded riverside terraces; the summer leaves the city noticeably calmer.

Public culture has been deliberately built. The municipality has filled the streets with sculpture, opened museums of wax figures and modern glass art, supported theatre companies, and staged festivals through the year. The university keeps museums of its own, among them collections of contemporary art and educational cartoons, and its arts faculties feed the scene.

The old crafts survive alongside this. Meerschaum carving is the city's own tradition: the stone, dug from pits on the plain around the city, is soft enough to be worked with a knife when damp, and workshops in Odunpazarı turn it into pipes and small sculptures that harden and colour with age. Glassmaking and woodwork are sold in the same lanes.

Community identity is layered. Crimean Tatars, Balkan Muslims and later arrivals from central Anatolia all settled here, bringing their own foods, festivals and associations, and Tatar culture in particular is visible in the kitchens. Manners are urban, informal and secular-leaning, with the mixed, relaxed evening promenade along the Porsuk as the city's characteristic social scene.

About 900,000 people live in the province, the great majority in the two urban districts of Tepebaşı and Odunpazarı, which together form one continuous city. Most housing is in apartment blocks, ringed by newer estates, with the restored timber houses of the old quarter now mainly given over to guesthouses, workshops and cafés.

The economy is industrial and academic in roughly equal measure. Railway workshops have been here for well over a century; factories build aircraft engines and components, rail vehicles, white goods, bricks and cement, and the surrounding province produces boron minerals in quantity, along with wheat and sugar beet. The universities are among the city's largest employers, and student spending underpins much of the retail and catering in the centre.

Daily life is unusually walkable and public: the tram, the pedestrian streets, the riverbanks and the parks are used heavily, and evenings out in cafés are a normal part of the week rather than a treat. Cycling is more common than in most Turkish cities. Local concerns are familiar ones — the cost of living, student housing, traffic on the ring roads and air quality in still winter weather — and the city's reputation for tidy public space is defended with some vigour.

The dish most associated with Eskişehir arrived with the Crimean Tatars: çiğ börek, known locally as çibörek, a half-moon of thin dough filled with raw minced meat and onion and fried until the crust blisters. Salons devoted to it are found all over the city, and it is eaten with ayran. Tatar cooking also brings kalakay, a fried bread, and various boiled and baked dumplings to family tables.

Met helva is the local sweet: sugar and flour worked and pulled on a marble slab into a chewy, pale block, cut to order and sold by weight, most visibly in Odunpazarı. Beyond these the food is plateau Anatolian — lamb grills, pide, mantı, lentil soup, stuffed vegetables — supplemented by the province's wheat, sugar beet and dairy.

Student demand keeps prices low and the range wide: toast and döner counters, kebab houses, pide salons and cheap breakfast places cluster in the centre, while the riverside terraces serve meze, rakı and beer in a city where drinking is unremarkable. Tea gardens along the Porsuk and in Odunpazarı's courtyards do steady business from morning to late evening, and the coffee culture is stronger than in most cities of its size.