İznik

The town was founded in the 4th century BC by one of Alexander's successors and renamed Nicaea after the wife of Lysimachus. Its regular grid and the ring of walls, rebuilt under Rome and repeatedly strengthened afterwards, still define the shape of the place. As a Roman and then Byzantine city it was prosperous and strategically placed on the road east from Constantinople, and in 325 the emperor Constantine summoned the bishops of the empire here for the first ecumenical council of the Christian Church, which produced the Nicene Creed. A second council met in the church of Hagia Sophia in 787 to settle the dispute over religious images.

After the Fourth Crusade took Constantinople in 1204, Nicaea became the capital of an exiled Byzantine state that recovered the imperial city in 1261. Seventy years later the town fell to the young Ottoman principality, and its churches were converted and new mosques, baths and soup kitchens built beside them.

Its lasting fame came in the 15th and 16th centuries, when İznik's potters supplied the Ottoman court with tiles and vessels in cobalt blue, turquoise and a distinctive sealing-wax red, glazed to a brilliance that later makers could not match. The workshops declined in the 17th century and eventually stopped. Earthquakes, the wars of 1919–22 and a long quiet period left a small agricultural town inside its ancient walls; tile making was deliberately revived in the late 20th century, and excavation of the Roman theatre and other sites continues.

Two identities sit side by side here. For Christian visitors İznik is Nicaea, the place of the creed recited in churches around the world, and pilgrims and church delegations come to the rebuilt Hagia Sophia, now a working mosque, and the lakeside where a sunken basilica was identified in 2014. For Turkey it is a quiet Ottoman market town and the home of the country's most admired ceramic tradition.

Tiles set the tone of daily life in the centre. Workshops line the two main streets, and painters can be seen filling in patterns of carnations, tulips and saz leaves copied from Ottoman originals; the craft supports a local guild of makers, sellers and teachers, and pieces made here go to restoration projects in mosques around the country. Hand-painted work is expensive and clearly distinguished from the cheaper transfer-printed ceramics sold to passing coaches.

Otherwise the customs are those of rural Bursa province: conservative dress, mosque attendance, coffee houses full of men at midday, and a farming calendar built around olives and fruit. The lake is the town's shared space, used for picnics, swimming and fishing, and weekend arrivals from the cities are a large part of the local economy without having changed the town's character much.

About 44,000 people live in the district of İznik, part of the province of Bursa, a good many of them in the town itself and the rest in the villages around the lake. It is small enough that most people know each other, and the working day begins early and ends with tea in the gardens by the water.

Agriculture is the mainstay. Olive groves cover the slopes around the lake, and olive growing is a mainstay of the lakeside districts; fruit, vegetables and grapes fill the plain, and fishing on the lake adds a little. The tile workshops employ a modest number of people between them, and tourism is seasonal: day visitors from Bursa and Istanbul, church groups, and Turkish families at the lakeside in summer.

The town's issues are those of a small place with an ancient site underneath it. Building is constrained by archaeology and by the walls, young people leave for Bursa and Istanbul for work and study, and the health of the lake — water levels, pollution from farming and the pressure of shoreline development — is a recurring local subject. Excavations continue in the theatre and around the gates, and restoration work on the walls goes on in stages.

Olives are the first thing the town is known for. The groves around the lake produce table olives cured in brine and salt, sold in every grocer's in the centre, alongside local olive oil pressed after the autumn harvest. Breakfast in İznik means those olives with white cheese, tomatoes, bread and honey, taken slowly and at length.

Fish from the lake appears on the shoreline tables: carp and other freshwater species grilled or fried and served with rocket, lemon and meze of yoghurt and vegetables in oil. Inland the cooking is that of Bursa province — köfte grilled over charcoal, pide baked in long ovens, stews of beans and lamb in the lokantas — with gözleme, thin pancakes filled with cheese, potato or spinach, cooked on griddles at the market and at roadside stops.

Fruit is the other speciality. The plain around the town grows peaches, grapes, quinces and mulberries, and much of the crop is dried, bottled or turned into jam and sold from the same shops as the olives. Kestane şekeri, the candied chestnuts of the Uludağ slopes, and Bursa's İskender kebap are close enough to count as local, and tea in a lakeside garden at sunset is the town's own small ritual.