Bolu
"Ask any Turk where the country's cooks come from, and Bolu is the answer before the question finishes."
A forested mountain town between Istanbul and Ankara, famous in Turkish folklore for its chefs and prized as the gateway to Abant Lake.
I stopped in Bolu on a long drive from Istanbul to Ankara, mostly to stretch my legs, and ended up staying the night because the air smelled like pine and woodsmoke and I genuinely didn’t want to get back in the car. Bolu sits in a mountain valley on the old highway between the two cities, surrounded by dense forest that turns the whole region a deep green even in the flat light of a cloudy afternoon, and the town itself has the unhurried, slightly provincial calm of a place people pass through rather than a place people go specifically to see.
Except, as I learned from the guesthouse owner over breakfast the next morning, Turks absolutely do have a specific association with Bolu — it’s the historic wellspring of the country’s professional cooks. For generations, Bolu has supplied Istanbul’s kitchens, from Ottoman palace chefs onward, with such a disproportionate number of skilled cooks that “Bolu aşçısı” (Bolu cook) became a kind of cultural shorthand, a stock character in Turkish jokes and folklore — the competent, slightly gruff professional chef who inevitably turns out to be from Bolu. My host told this to me with visible pride, then made me a breakfast good enough that I believed every word of it.
The Town as a Threshold
Bolu’s real function, for most travelers, is as the last real town before the mountains close in around Abant Lake, about half an hour’s drive south into the Köroğlu range. But treating it purely as a gateway undersells it a little. The central market street sells hazelnuts and dried fruit from the surrounding hills, the local çay houses are full of men playing okey late into the evening, and the mountain air — genuinely noticeably cooler and cleaner than Istanbul’s — makes just sitting outside a small pleasure. I walked through a light rain in the town center in the early evening and had one of those unremarkable, perfectly content travel moments: nowhere to be, good bread in a bag, mountains all around.
When to go: Late spring through early autumn for the forest at its greenest and the mountain air at its most pleasant; winter brings snow and a cozier, wood-stove version of the same town if you don’t mind the cold.