Mudanya -- New look for the armistice town

Just visit the İDO İstanbul seabuses Web site, check the timetable, book a ticket, head for Yenikapı and away you go. A couple of hours later and you'll be alighting in Güzelyalı whence all you need do is walk out to the main road, turn right and hop onto the next passing bus.

Well, that's the theory anyway, except that at this time of year the seabus service to Güzelyalı has been brought sharply forward so that unless you fancy getting up at 5:30 a.m. to be at Yenikapı for 7 a.m., you won't be able to make it there and back in the same day. Unless you take the boat to Yalova, that is, and therein lies an adventure.

“It's only an hour from Yalova to Mudanya,” the delightful young woman at the ticket office assured me, thus clinching a sale. The trouble is that there are no direct buses from Yalova to Mudanya. Instead, you must travel to Bursa's bus station where you will discover that there are no direct buses from Bursa either except those that connect with the Güzelyalı ferry. Instead, you must take a seemingly never-ending bus ride through the grisly suburbs of Bursa to a smaller minibus station where, at last, you will find transport to Mudanya. Journey time? One and a quarter hours on the seabus and then another two hours and no less than three changes of bus to reach your destination.

At this point most people will be tossing the paper aside in disgust, wondering why, in any case, they would want to go to Mudanya. The reason is simple. This is a town on the verge of a breakthrough. First up for the makeover was Tirilye (Zeytinbağı), the smaller town a little further west along the coast with its fine Byzantine churches and old Ottoman houses. Now it is Mudanya's turn and gentrification is ripping through the back streets at a quite astonishing pace.

Mudanya is the sort of place that you could be forgiven for passing through without stopping since its main street has little to show for itself, bar a long line of oh-so-familiar grocery shops and one truly delightful olde-worlde teahouse. But in the late 19th century this was a town that received a distinct boost from the arrival of the railway, which brought it within easy reach of Bursa. The result was that the streets running back from the sea quickly filled up with a network of fine houses. Of course the “yalı,” the fine wooden seaside mansion, will always be associated most strongly with İstanbul, but there were also yalıs in a few others places, including Mudanya, albeit not quite on the scale of the Kıbrıslı Yalısı in Kandilli or the Ethem Pertev Yalısı in Kanlıca.

Until recently Mudanya's yalıs had been virtually abandoned, along with the smaller Ottoman houses of wood and stone that congregated around them. Now suddenly restoration is all the rage, with the lovely Şükrü Bey Yalısı, dating back to 1895, as the centerpiece. The frilly woodwork of the roofline will be familiar to İstanbullus from the many Arnavutköy models. However, the steps up to the main door and the lovely ceiling above the porch evoke the back streets of Ayvalık, or even Yeni Foça, and hint at the fact that there was a large Greek population here before the 1923 population exchange. Sure enough, not far away the Uğur Mumcu Cultural Center is housed inside what must have been an enormous church in the late 19th century.

The Şükrü Bey Yalısı is not open to the public. However, an even more impressive mansion right on the seafront is, and that is the whitewashed Mütareke Evi (Armistice House), originally built for a Russian named Alexander Ganyanof. This was where, in October 1922, İsmet Inönü, later the country's second president, signed a treaty with representatives of Britain, France and Italy that effectively brought Turkey into existence as a new country. Later the building was bought and restored by a local businessman, before being acquired by the state in 1937.

Inside the house you can see the room where the treaty was signed with mannequins of the story's main players sitting stiffly at a table in their army uniforms. You can also inspect a room that served as a study for İsmet İnönü, then simply İsmet Paşa in the days before Atatürk persuaded everyone to adopt a surname. But for most visitors, the real interest will lie in the chance to see inside the building and eye up the sort of decoration and furnishings that would have filled all the nearby houses in their heyday. It is a shame that the upstairs is closed to visitors and that curtains shield the wonderful sea view from their gaze, but perhaps as more people come to Mudanya ...

Across the road from the Mütareke Evi a monument to the armistice stands in a small park, while on the road outside an outsized statue of a dove with an olive branch in its mouth hammers home the message of peace.

Although there were Greek and Roman settlements in the vicinity, there is very little to show for the pre-19th-century Mudanya today: just the restored brickwork of the main street's mosque which dates back to the 1500's and the remains of what must have been an impressive double-domed hamam (Turkish bath) and small han (inn) in the back streets. The hamam in particular looks like a prime candidate for restoration, which may well come in the foreseeable future given the speed of development. This very week, for example, a small building near the harbor that was built in the First National style popularized in İstanbul by Vedat Tek and Kemaleddin Bey opened as Mudanya's own Sosyal Tesisleri (Social Facilities).

For a while, the biggest problem with visiting Mudanya was a lack of decent hotels. Now the town is carving out a particular niche for itself in the imaginative reuse of unlikely structures to create accommodation. First off the block was the Hotel Montania (the old name for Mudanya), created out of a French-built Customs House that had gone on to serve as the local train station. The railway service that had brought new life to Mudanya died a death in the 1950s and for years the station stood empty. Then it was turned into a wonderful waterside hotel where diners could sit on what was once a platform and gaze out to sea over their suppers. Today, a wooden deck and swimming pool have been added to the mix, making this an excellent place to stay.

Then someone decided that what could be done with a train station could also be done with a decommissioned ferry and now Mudanya (well, Güzelyalı actually, but it's only six kilometers down the road) has a hotel housed on board a boat. Other new hotels have also started to open their doors, albeit along the more familiar lines of the converted Ottoman houses developed in Safranbolu, Mudurnu, Beypazarı and Triliye itself. One thing's for sure and that is that no one need fear missing the last ferry back to İstanbul anymore.

How to get there

İDO (www.ido.com.tr) seabuses run from Yenikapı in İstanbul to Güzelyalı, a short bus ride from Mudanya.

Where to stay

Golden Hotel: 0224 544 6464

Hotel La Fontaine: 0224 543 1041

Hotel Montania: 0224 544 6000

Otantik Gemi Otel, Güzelyalı: 0224 554 4300