Iznik Tiles and the Cini Workshops

Iznik ware is not ordinary pottery. The body is mostly ground quartz with a little clay, which fires white and hard and takes a glaze like glass, and from the late fifteenth century the town's kilns supplied the Ottoman court with the tiles that line mosque walls in Istanbul, Bursa and Edirne. The palette moved from cobalt blue on white to turquoise and sage green, and finally to the thick sealing-wax red that sits slightly proud of the surface and that nobody has fully reproduced since. Production collapsed in the seventeenth century and the trade passed to Kutahya. Workshops in Iznik began rebuilding the technique in the 1990s and now fire tiles by the old recipe.

What you actually see

• Working kilns - small workshops around town where tiles are drawn, glazed and fired.
• The red - the raised sealing-wax red of the classical period, the hardest colour to get back.
• Quartz bodies - the white, glass-hard fabric that separates cini from ordinary earthenware.
• Tile panels in place - the town's older buildings, and Bursa's tiled mosques an hour west.

When to go

Spring and autumn are best; the lake road is pleasant and workshops keep normal hours. Many are small family operations that close on Sundays and over religious holidays, and a call ahead gets you a demonstration rather than a shop counter. Firing days are irregular, so watching a kiln opened is luck rather than planning.

Honest expectations

Most shops on the main street sell cheap transfer-printed tiles from elsewhere and call them Iznik; genuine hand-painted quartz work costs many times more, and it is worth asking which you are looking at. Iznik town is quiet and short of good places to eat. The lake is silty rather than swimmable, and the drive from Bursa is slow behind lorries.

Nearby

The lake shore, the town's old walls and gates, and the tiled mosques of Bursa to the west.