In Bursa city, the things to see are mostly what the early Ottoman sultans built: the Green Complex of Mehmed Çelebi with its tiled tomb, the Muradiye complex and its garden of tombs, the foundations of Bayezid I at Yıldırım, the tomb of Orhan in Tophane Park, and the old commercial quarter of hans with the Irgandı Bridge. Cumalıkızık, an Ottoman village eleven kilometres from the centre, shares a UNESCO listing with the Muradiye, and Mount Uludağ, a national park with a ski centre, rises over the city. Beyond Bursa are İznik, Gölyazı on Lake Uluabat and Mudanya on the coast. You will find a separate page for every one of them.
The Green Complex, Yıldırım and Emir Sultan
Mehmed Çelebi built the Yeşil complex, a mosque, a medrese, a bath, a soup kitchen and the Green Tomb where he lies, and the name comes from the tomb's turquoise İznik tilework. What sets it apart is the layout: the buildings stand free of one another instead of following one scheme. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism sees it as the moment Bursa came back, in building as in social life, from the ruin left by Timur. Its medrese, from 1419, has been the city's museum of Turkish and Islamic art since 1975.
In Yıldırım, Bayezid I left a medrese of 1399, longer in plan than other medreses, whose open classroom is crowned by a dome with thirteen rows of muqarnas at its corners. His tomb on Yıldırım Caddesi stands behind a porch of three domes, making it, according to the ministry's culture portal, the first Ottoman tomb to be given a porch; he died in 1402 and was buried first in Akşehir before being brought here. East of the city, on a hillside at the foot of Uludağ, his daughter Hundi Hatun built the Emir Sultan Mosque after the death of her husband, a holy man born in Bukhara who died in 1429; its tomb is a place of pilgrimage that fills on religious days.
The Muradiye complex
Murad II built the Muradiye over 1425 and 1426, the last complex an Ottoman sultan raised in Bursa, and UNESCO inscribed it in 2014. The mosque has a wooden door made in the kündekari technique without nails or glue, İznik tiles and a painted ceiling, and beside the entrance two lightning marks in blue tile, taken as a symbol of a sultan who fell on his enemies like lightning. The tombs in the garden are what most visitors come for: Murad II and his family, and among them the shared tomb of Mustafa and Cem, sons of Mehmed the Conqueror, a hexagonal building with a porch entirely of marble. In the tomb of Mükrime Hatun, of 1515, the painted walls lie under later whitewash.
The complex's medrese has held the Kur'an and Manuscripts Museum since 2019, following the writing of the Qur'an through calligraphy, with binding, illumination, miniature and marbling beside it and an eighteenth-century cover from the cenotaph of Murad I in the main eyvan. Facing the complex, the Ottoman House Museum, a three-storey wooden house of the seventeenth century and one of the oldest in Bursa, is also known as Mehmed the Conqueror's birthplace, because a pavilion of Murad II probably occupied the site before it.
Tophane, the hans and the city museums
In Tophane Park in the Hisar quarter, the tomb of Orhan, the second Ottoman sultan and the man who took Bursa from the Byzantines, faces the tomb of Osman Gazi; it stands on the floor mosaics of the monastery of Saint Elias. The district of commercial inns begins with the Pirinç Han, and at its eastern end the Panorama 1326 Bursa Conquest Museum paints the Ottoman capture of the citadel on 6 April 1326 around a full circle under a dome forty-two metres wide, with a roof terrace looking over historic Bursa and Uludağ. Irgandı Bridge, thought to date from 1442, was built with sixteen shops on each side, though Evliya Çelebi wrote of two hundred. Cumhuriyet Avenue, opened in 1906 and closed to cars since 2004, runs through the hans with some 270 shops and a nostalgic tram line laid in 2011.
On Heykel Square the Bursa City Museum fills the old courthouse with the city's history, wax figures of the six sultans of Bursa and a basement market of sixteen reconstructed eighteenth-century shops. The Karagöz Museum on Çekirge Avenue, facing the tomb of Karagöz and Hacivat, shows shadow-play figures and has a small performance hall. In the Kültürpark, the Archaeological Museum covers ancient Bithynia and Mysia, including a Graeco-Persian funerary stele that the ministry counts among only three known examples. At Merinos, the textile museum in the old woollen mill follows wool from fibre to garment and, since 2013, Bursa's silk from cocoon to loom. The Atatürk House Museum on Çekirge Caddesi keeps almost all of the furniture Atatürk used here, and the Kükürtlü springs, whose men's section goes back to Murad I, are today a rehabilitation and research centre of Uludağ University, not a public bath.
Cumalıkızık
Cumalıkızık sits on the northern slopes of Uludağ, now a neighbourhood of Yıldırım, and UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List in 2014, in the same six-part listing as the Muradiye. It was founded as a vakıf village and, unlike the villages around it, it was left intact by the Greek occupation of 1920–22, which is why its early Ottoman village houses survive. They are usually of three storeys, built of rubble stone, timber and mudbrick, painted yellow, white, blue and purple, along narrow stone-paved lanes with no pavements; the mosque, the Zekiye Hatun fountain and a single-domed bath are Ottoman, and an ethnography museum in the square shows village life. The trip takes about twenty minutes: the metro to Cumalıkızık-Değirmenönü, then a minibus.
Mount Uludağ
Uludağ National Park, declared in 1961, covers the mountain to the south and south-east of the city; a road and a cable car climb it, and many paths cross between its valleys and hills on both the northern and southern sides. The ski centre, 36 kilometres from central Bursa, lies on two hills, Fatintepe and Kuşaklıkaya, with runs between 1,750 and 2,435 metres below a summit of 2,543 metres. Lifts, the season and the country's other ski mountains are covered in a separate article on skiing in Türkiye on this site.
Further out: İznik, Gölyazı, Mudanya and Misi
İznik has a Roman theatre of the second century, put up under Trajan by Pliny as governor of Bithynia; Turkish Wikipedia calls it the only one in Türkiye built on flat ground over vaults. The İznik Museum, in its new building since 2023, shows close to 1,500 objects, among them the Achilles sarcophagus and the Antigonos sarcophagus with the lament of his wife Arete. The Nilüfer Hatun soup kitchen of 1388, which the ministry says introduced the T-plan to Ottoman building, shows examples of İznik tilework. The basilica found under the lake in 2014 can now be visited through the site museum on the shore, opened on 28 October 2025 with a walkway over the water.
Gölyazı, ancient Apollonia ad Rhyndacum, lies 42 kilometres from Bursa on a peninsula in Lake Uluabat, a Ramsar site since 1998; the village stands inside some 800 metres of ancient walling, with houses built on the walls themselves, and a plane tree said to be 750 years old guards the bridge to the mainland. At Mudanya, the house where the armistice was signed on 11 October 1922 has been a museum since 1937, its furnishings of the time preserved. In Misi, a village of Nilüfer, museums of photography, literature and intangible heritage can be seen in one walk.
