Selimiye Mosque
My revised travel plan was to visit Edirne about 2 1/2 hours and about 150 miles north of Istanbul which use to be the Capitol of the Ottoman Empire. It was just a few miles south of Greece and Bulgaria borders.
I first took the tram from Sirkeci to the M1 Red subway to the Otogar stop where I would get my bus ticket at the Metro bus ticket office.
I was amazed at how large Istanbul was as our bus journeyed on several toll roads north. Once out of Istanbul, the land reminded me of traveling along the I-5 freeway north from San Francisco to Redding, CA with its rolling hills and wheat fields.
When I got to the Edirne Otogar--bus station, the Lonely Planet guide indicated that the bus companies had service buses that would take you to the center of town some 8 km to the north. I checked a couple of places, without luck.
As I was considering taking a taxi to town, I saw a small number of city buses parked outside. No English is spoken here, so I showed the bus driver that was taking a smoke break a map of downtown and he pointed to his bus. The cost of the ride was 3.5 TL vs 35TL for a taxi. It was a roundabout ride through the university and some neighborhoods until I got off at the Selimiye Mosque which was close to the hotel I planned to stay at.
There must be over 20 mosques in the downtown area with the Selimiye Mosque as the centerpiece and some consider it to be the greatest in Turkey. It was completed in 1575 and is on the World Heritage list including the entire complex called Kulliye which includes a madrese—school—and arasta—covered arcade of shops.
I stayed for two nights at the Efe Hotel which was 150 TL per night and included a Turkish-style breakfast—hard-boiled egg, two kinds of cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, bread, and cay. The receptionist was one of the few people who spoke English I met while here. The hotel was in the old Ottoman-era neighborhood with its cobbled streets that were mostly walking streets closed to cars.
Nearby was an old covered bazaar dating from the 1500s that sold similar items such as clothing, baklava, Turkish delights, scarves and trinkets, cooking utensils, and spices.
North of town, I visited the Sultan Beyazit II Mosque along with its Museum of Health which traces the history of Islamic medicine that was developed between 1488 and 1909. Some of the treatments portrayed were fascinating and some were cringe-worthy.
The Selimiye Mosque dominated the city center which was built between 1569 and 1575.
This mosque included a medrese—school, and an arasta—covered arcade of shops that sold goods similar to those in the old covered bazaar near the Old Mosque built between 1403 and1414.
I visited the Grand Synagogue built in 1906, but it was closed because of COVID 19. At one time there were more than 20,000 Sephardic Jews who lived here and now there are just a handful of Jews still living in Edirne.
Two of the museums here were also closed that feature Turkish and Islamic art and artifacts.
I found the city-covered market just across from the stadium that hosts the annual Kirkpinar (40 Springs) Oil-Wrestling Festival where oiled-up combatants wearing short leather pants try to wrestle their opponent to the ground or lift them over their heads for victory—a slippery prospect.
I spotted this statute of grappling wrestlers honoring this Turkish tradition. A legend that surrounds this activity is that back in 1363 following a battle victory, two evenly matched wrestlers began their contest which ran for days until both dropped dead. After their bodies were buried under a fig tree, a spring appeared. They named this site Kirkpinar (40 Springs) in the wrestlers’ honor.
On September 29th, I returned to the Edirne Otogar about 8 km south of town via one of the city buses, and I was glad that I had already purchased my return trip to Istanbul.
The bus went through a big rainstorm along these smooth toll roads and freeways that were beautifully landscaped as we came into Istanbul.
After departing from the bus at the Istanbul Otogar, it was a short walk to the Istanbul Metro Otogar stop followed by a transfer to the tram to the Sirkeci area and the Golden Horn Istanbul Hotel, my Istanbul hotel.
For the next few days, I plan to tour some of the highlighted mosques, museums, and other tourist attractions before I join up with the Intrepid Tour starting on October 5th. It would be an amazing tour including Gallipoli, Fethiye, Pamukkale, Antalya, Cappadocia, and Mt. Nemrut. Part of the tour would include a night aboard a gulet cruising the south coast, taking a hot air balloon over the carved-up Cappadocia landscape, doing a homestay near Kahta, and observing a whirling dervish sect trance dance with some traditional and belly dance performances along the way.
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