Safranbolu

Settlement on this site is old — the area lay within Paphlagonia and passed through Hittite, Phrygian, Lydian, Persian, Roman and Byzantine hands — but the town visible today is a product of the Ottoman centuries. Safranbolu stood on the caravan road between Gerede and the Black Sea port of Amasra, and later on the routes linking Istanbul with the interior, and it grew as a place where merchants, muleteers and craftsmen gathered.

Trade paid for the buildings that define it. The Köprülü Mehmed Pasha Mosque went up in the 17th century, and in the same period the caravanserai known as Cinci Han and the bath beside it were built. Local families sent sons into Ottoman service — the grand vizier İzzet Mehmed Pasha, who endowed the largest mosque in the town in the 1790s, was born here — and the tanners, saddlers, coppersmiths and shoemakers of the market quarter supplied the caravans. The town's name records saffron, grown in the surrounding villages and traded as a luxury.

Safranbolu's population long included a Greek Orthodox community, concentrated in Kıranköy, which left in the 1923 population exchange with Greece. The caravan trade had already faded when the railway and the new roads bypassed the town, and in the 1930s the republic built a large steelworks at neighbouring Karabük, which drew away work and people. That decline preserved the old houses: too poor to rebuild, the town kept them. From the 1970s conservation efforts gathered pace, and in 1994 UNESCO inscribed Safranbolu on the World Heritage List as an example of an Ottoman caravan town.

The town's culture is built around its houses. A Safranbolu konak typically has a stone lower floor for storage and animals and timber upper floors that project over the lane, with shuttered windows, a wide central hall, built-in cupboards, carved wooden ceilings and a rotating cupboard door that allowed food to be passed without the women of the house being seen. Families kept two homes — a winter house in the valley and a summer house among the vineyards of Bağlar — and the habit shaped the layout of the whole town.

Crafts survive in the market quarter, where the old guild streets are still named for leatherworkers, blacksmiths and coppersmiths. Wood turning, felt making, hand-woven cloth and the making of Turkish delight are practised for visitors as much as for locals now, but the workshops are real ones. Folk music and craft demonstrations appear at summer events in the courtyards.

Manners are those of a conservative Anatolian town: neighbours know one another, hospitality is close to obligatory, and tea is the basis of social life. Residents are used to being photographed but not always pleased by it, and conservation rules govern what can be altered on almost every building, a subject of constant local discussion. Saffron, once a trade good, has returned as a badge of identity, appearing in sweets, soaps and the town's festivals.

About 50,000 people live in the district, most of them in the town and its modern quarters rather than in the protected old streets, where many buildings are guesthouses, museums or shops. Karabük, about 9 kilometres away, is the provincial capital and far larger, and the two places function as one labour market.

Work comes from three sources: tourism in the old town, the steelworks and related industry at Karabük, and the university and public offices. Farming in the surrounding villages produces saffron in small quantities, along with fruit, walnuts and livestock, and forestry matters in the hills. Young people leave for Ankara and Istanbul, as in most Anatolian towns, although the visitor trade has kept more of them at home than in similar places.

Daily rhythm is slow and domestic: shopping in Kıranköy, tea in the courtyards, and a steady flow of day visitors that swells at weekends and in summer and thins out in the middle of winter. The town's recurring concerns are the cost and difficulty of maintaining timber houses under heritage rules, parking and coach traffic pressing on narrow lanes, and the balance between living town and open-air museum.

Safranbolu is known above all for its sweets. Lokum, Turkish delight, is boiled and cut in shops all over Çarşı, often perfumed with the town's saffron and studded with walnuts or pistachios; slabs of it are sold beside sugared almonds and thin sheets of dried fruit pulp. Saffron itself turns up in tea, in rice and in a saffron-scented version of zerde, the sweet yellow rice pudding served at weddings.

The savoury kitchen is inland Anatolian rather than coastal. Düğün çorbası, a wedding soup of meat stock thickened with flour and egg and finished with peppery butter, is a local staple, and etli yaprak sarma, vine leaves stuffed with rice and meat, appears at every celebration. Peruhi, a filled pasta close to mantı and served with yoghurt and garlic, is the dish most associated with Safranbolu's own households, alongside the pastry known as Safranbolu bükmesi.

Bakeries sell flatbread and börek layered with cheese or meat, and the surrounding villages supply walnuts, honey and fruit. Tea is drunk constantly, with Turkish coffee in the courtyard cafés of the old town; in the cold months salep, a thick hot drink dusted with cinnamon, is sold in the market lanes.