Yalova

i.The Gulf Shore Opposite İstanbul

Yalova sits on the southern shore of the long, deep arm of the Marmara that the maps call the Gulf of İzmit — that fifty-kilometre-long sea-water inlet that runs east from the open Marmara into the Anatolian interior. The province occupies a narrow shelf of country, perhaps fifteen or twenty kilometres broad at its widest, between the gulf in the north and the forested ridge of the Samanlı Dağları rising sharply to the south. The mountains are not high by Anatolian standards — the principal summits reach a little above 900 metres — but they shut off Yalova from the wider plains of Bursa to the south, and they give the province its small, sheltered, distinctly maritime feeling. From the seafront at the provincial centre you can see İstanbul plainly on a clear morning: the skyline of Kartal and Pendik on the European-Asian horizon, the ferries crossing.

The ferries are how most travellers arrive. Fast catamarans run several times a day from Yenikapı on the European side and from Pendik and Bostancı on the Asian side, and the crossing takes about an hour. The road from the eastern bridge over the gulf — the great Osman Gazi Köprüsü, opened in 2016 — connects Yalova by motorway to Bursa in the south and to İstanbul in the north. The result is a province that is, in modern terms, an outer satellite of İstanbul — close enough for a weekend, far enough that the city's noise drops away on the ferry crossing.

The country has long been agricultural in a particular way. The slopes that climb behind Çınarcık and Armutlu carry old olive groves; the inland plains around the centre and Çiftlikköy are given over to a more recent specialisation — cut flowers and ornamental plants — that has made Yalova one of the principal Turkish suppliers of the trade. Greenhouses on the road south-west of the city, glasshouses on the lower hill slopes, nurseries along the highway: in the right season the air at the road's edge smells faintly of carnations.

A small province on a deep gulf opposite İstanbul, with mountains behind, an old thermal valley in its hills, and a wooden mansion on rails by the sea.

ii.Pylai through Constantine — the Antique Layer

The ancient Greeks knew the gulf's southern shore as Pylai, "the gates," and the Romans wrote it Pylae. The name is geographical: Pylai marked the southern end of the principal sea crossing from Nicomedia (modern İzmit, in Kocaeli province) on the gulf's eastern head — the established way for travellers from the imperial road system to reach the Bithynian inland by water rather than by the longer overland route. Through the late Roman and early Byzantine centuries Pylai was a working ferry station, with its own small harbour and a road south through the Samanlı Dağları toward Prusa (modern Bursa) and the wider Anatolian interior.

What made the shore notable, even then, was not the harbour but what lay behind it: a small valley of hot springs in the hills above the modern town of Termal, ten or twelve kilometres south-west of the provincial centre. Mineral waters issued from the ground at temperatures high enough to bathe in directly. The Romans developed the baths as a recognised therapeutic site; later Byzantine tradition placed the convalescence of Constantine the Great at these springs. The emperor, in the years before his transfer of the eastern capital to Constantinople in 330 CE, is said in the later sources to have taken the waters at Pylai for the relief of an illness — a detail that became, through long retelling, part of the local folklore of the springs themselves.

The springs continued to draw bathers through the Byzantine and Seljuk centuries. After the Ottoman absorption of the southern Marmara in the early fourteenth century — Bursa fell to Orhan Gazi in 1326, and the southern gulf coast came under firm Ottoman control in the years that followed — the bathing complex passed into the small inventory of provincial Ottoman thermal towns. It was not Bursa: it never developed the great Sinan-period bath architecture that the Bursa thermal town of Çekirge carries. But it kept its working bath-houses, its visitors from İstanbul, and its place in the long Anatolian tradition of kaplıca.

A name that wandered

The modern name Yalova is sometimes traced to the Turkish yalı, "the shore" or "the waterfront mansion" — the same word that gives the wooden seafront houses of the Bosphorus their name — with the locative ending common to Anatolian place-names. In other readings the form is older and the etymology Greek. The provincial centre carried the working name Yalakabad in some Ottoman registers; the form Yalova settled in the late Ottoman period and has stood since.

iii.Atatürk and the Walking Mansion

The defining episode of the modern town is short, well-attested, and entirely characteristic of its protagonist. In the summer of 1929, the founder of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was in residence at a small wooden mansion on the Yalova seafront — a working summer house, modest by the standards of the period's official architecture, two storeys, with a verandah along the side facing the sea. A great plane tree — çınar in Turkish, the eastern plane that grows along the watercourses of Anatolia — stood close to one corner of the building. A branch of the tree had grown through the projecting eaves and was beginning to press against the timber roof. The estate's caretakers proposed pruning the branch.

Atatürk refused. The story, in the form it has been told in Republican memory ever since, is that he gave instructions instead to move the mansion. Engineers cleared a short distance of ground toward the sea, laid down rails, and on the appointed day the wooden house was lifted from its foundations and rolled — slowly, intact, with the verandah and the windows in place — several metres along its new line. The plane tree kept its branch and its place; the mansion settled into its new footprint a little nearer the water. From that operation the building took its lasting name: the Yürüyen Köşk, the Walking Mansion.

Atatürk returned to Yalova often through the next decade. He used the thermal complex at Termal regularly; he ordered its restoration and the building of a new bath-house there in the mid-1930s, on a Republican-modernist plan that survives today. He laid out the seafront park around the Walking Mansion himself, with the help of the agronomists then beginning the establishment of the Yalova agricultural research institute that would, in time, give the province its modern flower-growing specialisation. The mansion, the thermal complex, the seafront, and the cut-flower country are, in this sense, parts of the same Republican-period project.

iv.Termal — the Thermal Tradition

The thermal valley sits at the head of a small wooded glen ten or twelve kilometres south-west of the provincial centre, in what is now the separate district of Termal. The road from the city climbs gently through pine and oak woodland and ends at a small enclosed complex of bath-houses, hotels, and ornamental gardens. The springs themselves rise at the head of the valley; the waters are warm — by the long-established measurement, in the upper fifties Celsius at the principal outlet — and carry a moderate mineral content of sodium chloride, calcium sulphate, and trace fluoride. They are bathed in for the relief of rheumatic and metabolic complaints, in the same uses for which they have been used since the Roman period.

The present complex is the inheritor of the 1930s Republican-period reconstruction. The principal Atatürk-period building — known locally as the Çamlık Oteli — keeps its long modernist lines and its set of small private bath cabins; the larger Çınar bath, with its open pool under a vaulted hall, is the working public bath of the town. Around them the small spa town is laid out on the kind of generous, gardened plan that the early Republic favoured for its public institutions: broad paths, ornamental ponds, plane trees, a small open-air theatre. The whole valley has been listed as a registered urban conservation site; new construction outside the older footprint is kept low and sparing.

Termal is, by the standards of the Anatolian thermal towns, a quiet place. It does not have the great Ottoman-period bath architecture of Bursa's Çekirge district, nor the modern resort scale of Afyon's spa hotels. What it has is the small-town intimacy of a single working thermal valley, set in trees within an hour of the country's largest city — a combination that has made it, for nearly a century, the principal weekend retreat of İstanbul's water-loving classes.

v.After 17 August 1999 — the Modern Province

Yalova was made a separate province in 1995, carved out of the southern reach of İstanbul Province as part of a wider Republican-period rationalisation of the country's administrative geography. The new province inherited six districts — the central Yalova city, the bay towns of Çınarcık and Altınova, the inland farming district of Çiftlikköy, the western peninsula district of Armutlu, and the small thermal-town district of Termal — and the small provincial-government structure that has, since, been the principal administrative fact of the place.

Four years after the new province was established, the 1999 earthquake struck. The rupture on the North Anatolian Fault ran east-west through the floor of the Gulf of İzmit; the southern shore of the gulf, on which Yalova sits, was directly above the moving fault. Çınarcık and Altınova lost a significant share of their building stock; the provincial centre, set back slightly from the most violent shaking, suffered less but still substantially. The reconstruction took most of a decade, and was the principal civic project of the young province through its first ten years of existence.

The province that emerged from that decade is small, ordered, and visibly post-1999. The new building stock is low — usually three or four storeys — and built to the revised seismic code; the seafront promenades at the central town, at Çınarcık, and at Altınova have been laid out in a single continuous Republican-modernist line; the older surviving fabric, including the Walking Mansion and the Atatürk-period buildings at Termal, has been carefully preserved. The agricultural economy of the cut flower has continued to grow — Yalova supplies a substantial share of the country's commercial flowers and ornamental nursery plants — and the small industrial base around paper, textiles, and food processing in the inland districts has held. The 2016 opening of the Osman Gazi Köprüsü across the gulf to the east, and the resulting motorway connection to İstanbul and Bursa, has made the province a manageable commute from the city for the first time in its history.

The population reported by TÜİK's address-based registration system has been steady in the recent counts at a little above three hundred thousand. That is small by Turkish provincial standards — Yalova is one of the smaller mainland provinces in both area and people. The smallness is, for most of its visitors, the point.

vi.Visiting Today

Yalova is one of the easier short trips from İstanbul. The ferry from Yenikapı takes about an hour and lands at the central ferry harbour, a five-minute walk from the seafront park where the Walking Mansion stands. From there it is a ten-or-fifteen-minute taxi or local bus up to the thermal valley at Termal. The whole circuit — ferry across, mansion, thermal bath, late lunch on the seafront, ferry back — is comfortable in a long day, and is one of the classic out-of-town outings from the city.

The province's six districts

Beyond the central city, the province breaks into five outlying districts: Altınova on the eastern bay, the working agricultural and coastal district at the gulf's narrowest point; Armutlu on the western peninsula, with its olive slopes and a smaller set of thermal springs of its own; Çiftlikköy on the inland plain, the cut-flower and greenhouse country; Çınarcık on the open Marmara shore, the principal bay-town and the worst-affected district of the 1999 earthquake, now substantially rebuilt; and Termal, the small thermal-town district in the wooded valley above the centre. Together with the central Yalova city, the six districts make up one of the smallest Turkish provinces by area — perhaps eight hundred and fifty square kilometres in total — and one of the most distinctly maritime.

A small Marmara province held between a deep gulf and a wooded ridge, where Constantine took the waters, Atatürk moved a house for a tree, and the cut flowers grow in long glasshouses on the road south.