Uludağ

Climate

As you may be expecting, Uludağ is far chillier than nearby Bursa thanks to its elevation. The wintersports season, especially skiing, is between October and April, with a guaranteed stable snowcover and constant below freezing temperatures between December and March. A summer day that is sweltering hot in Bursa is likely to be cool enough that makes it really uncomfortable without at least a cardigan outdoors in Uludağ during the day and definitely at night.

Understand

With its 2,543 mt/8,343 ft summit, Uludağ is the highest mountain of northwestern Turkey. There are some reports and photos that claims its summit is visible from Istanbul about 150 km north as the crow flies on clear days, though this is usually not the case due to humidity.

Uludağ has two sides to it: On one side, it's an untouched natural beauty of forests, hills, and rocks overlooked by eagles and on the other it's a heavily-used resort of wintersports. One might argue there is a third side as well, the relatively small-sized but well-used daily-use areas that are filled with kebab-odour that disseminate from grills of open-air restaurants.

Flora and fauna

Uludağ is one of the places where school geography textbooks come true: the mountain has belts of different types of vegetation varying with the elevation. The lowest slopes bordering Bursa, up to 350 mt above the sea level is covered with Mediterranean shrubs maquis, such as laurel trees. Between 350 through 700 mt, it's the warm temperate decidious forests dominated by chestnut trees this zone is where most of those delicious chestnut desserts unique to Bursa originates from. It's the time for cool temperate decidious woods between 700 to 1,500 mt, dominated by beech trees. 1,500 to 2,100 mt is the highest belt that still allow trees to grow, dominated by indemic firs of Uludağ. Tree-less and fragile alpine meadows cover the areas of mountain above 2,100 mt.

Bears, wolves, deers, and eagles among others are the dwellers of Uludağ.

Landscape

Northern side of the mountain overlooking the city of Bursa though you should be darn lucky to have a glimpse of the city from most locations on the mountain is dotted with a number of flat plateaus around 1,600 mt above the sea level: Sarıalan the main daily-use area and where cable cars from Bursa terminate, Kadıyayla where the cable car pauses before heading forward to Sarıalan, Karabelen when approaching by road, the national park gate is situated here, and Kirazlıyayla the first plateau after the park gate among others.

The southern slopes of the mountain is far steeper and is less accessible.

History

Uludağ was one of the twenty-odd mountains around the eastern half of Mediterranean basin that used to be called Olympos in ancient times—more precisely Mysian Olympos in this case, Mysia being the ancient name of the region what is about eastern two-thirds of Southern Marmara today.

In medieval times, Uludağ served as a hermitage to Christian monks, which explains why it was named Keşiş Dağı "Mountain of the Monks" in Ottoman Turkish. It was also this time when, in the absence of refrigators, the ice harvested from the mountain made its way to the imperial kitchen in Istanbul's Topkapı Palace. The mountain was later renamed Uludağ, which translates "Great Mountain" "great" being more in the sense of "grand", in 1935, about a decade after the Turkish Republic was founded.

Uludağ was the first and, still the most popular wintersports resort in Turkey, with the first guesthouses aimed at skiing enthusiasts opening in 1940s. It was declared a national park in 1961, but that didn't fully stop tourism developments.