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The painted timber houses of Odunpazarı

A hill of ochre, blue and rose Ottoman houses with their upper floors leaning over the lanes — the town Eskişehir grew out of, and still the first walk.

Freehalf a daya weekday morning, or late afternoon as the lamps come on

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Why do it?

Odunpazarı — the name means 'wood market' — is the slope on the southern edge of the plain where Eskişehir began, and the old quarter there holds one of the best-kept runs of Ottoman timber houses in central Anatolia: two-storey, brightly painted, with the upper floor jutting out over the street on carved brackets. The district restored the core street by street from the 2000s — around 300 houses, three mosques, two caravanserais and fifteen fountains across some thirty lanes — and in 2012 Turkey put the 'Odunpazarı Historical Urban Site' on its UNESCO World Heritage tentative list. Today the houses are homes, cafés, small museums, glass and meerschaum workshops and boutique hotels, and the quarter holds the Contemporary Glass Arts Museum, opened in 2007 in three restored houses with Anadolu University as Turkey's first museum of its kind.

The Smileys Take

This is the walk we do with every newcomer, and it works best with no plan: climb in from Atatürk Bulvarı, let the colours pull you up the lanes, and stop wherever someone is working in a doorway. Mornings are the quiet time; on weekends the main lanes fill with day-trippers off the Istanbul and Ankara trains, so go early or go late. Sit down for tea in a konak courtyard rather than buying another magnet. Be honest with visitors about what it is: a careful restoration, polished in places, but lived in all the same. The museums and the mosque complex below have their own entries — save at least one for a second visit.