A Turkish delight on the road to nowhere

If the ancient city of Edirne was situated just about anywhere else around the Mediterranean, it would be overrun by tour coaches. Its architecture is breathtaking, its atmosphere refreshingly unhurried, and the Old City is almost encircled by the tree-lined Tunca (pronounced toon-jah) River. Yet when I recently visited - admittedly out of season - I was the only foreign tourist in town.

The reason is that these days Edirne is, touristically speaking, on the road to nowhere. It is the last town in Turkey before you reach the border with Bulgaria and Greece. Which means it is well enough known to long- distance truckers, and to Turkish-German families who still drive down through the Balkans to spend their summer holidays with the grandparents. But to most other kinds of tourists it remains a terra incognita, even though it is only two hours' drive from Istanbul.

Once things were very different. Adrianople, as the Byzantine Greeks called it, was the most important city in Thrace. It was a key fortress guarding the Via Ignatia, which in classical times linked the twin imperial capitals of Rome and Constantinople. The legions marched through here to fight the tribes beyond the Danube. It was a stopping place for merchants and pilgrims, and for those most belligerent of medieval tourists, the Crusaders.

When the Ottoman Turks captured Adrianople in 1361, they made it the capital of their fast-expanding empire and renamed it Edirne. It was from here that Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror advanced, with teams of oxen dragging enormous cannon over specially reinforced bridges, to lay siege to Constantinople. Even after they conquered that wondrous city, they still spent much of their time in Edirne, hunting the surrounding woodlands in between military campaigns that reached as far as Vienna.

Upon this especially favoured city, a succession of Ottoman sultans and their grand viziers poured their bounty. The result is an astounding concentration of fine buildings: covered markets and caravanserai and bath-houses as well as religious complexes. In Edirne, even the mental asylum is beautiful. And because the town lost much of its importance once the Ottoman Empire was ejected from the Balkans, most of the buildings that went up in its heyday are still there, as though preserved in aspic.

A trickle of knowledgeable visitors still make it to Edirne. Before the break-up of Yugoslavia, it was a stopping point on the "Hippie Trail". But nowadays the only times the town fills up are during the seasonal migrations from Germany, and for the Romany spring festival and the marathon oil-wrestling contests held on an island just outside the city walls during the first week of July.

It is possible to "do" Edirne in a day excursion from Istanbul. But that requires some pretty frantic rushing around, and you will be unable to savour the town's discreet and thoroughly provincial charms. For what I found most delightful about Edirne - particularly after the big-city hustle of Istanbul - is that it is a sleepy market town where farmers arrive by horse-and-cart, and yet it is adorned with monuments befitting an imperial capital.

The view from the tourist information booth below the main bazaar is of multiple domes and variegated minarets of two 15th-century mosques in the foreground, while crowning the hill is that masterpiece of Ottoman architecture, the Selimiye mosque, its soaring dome of greater circumference than that of Aya Sofia, its pencil- thin minarets second only in height to those in Mecca. Such a cityscape stands comparison with anything Istanbul can offer. The mosque on the hill is the best work of Sinan, the greatest of Ottoman architects. To step beneath its dome is to enter a world of seemingly effortless harmony infused with light.

Yes, you can "do" Edirne's highlights in a day, but there would be no time to loiter in one of the garden cafes or tea-houses that cluster around the fountains in every square. And Edirne is home to a very languid cafe society, where people sip their drinks slowly, watching the world go by or perusing their Sunday newspapers. There is no heavy industry around Edirne, no pollution, no big-city bustle. So the locals sit around in the open air, enjoying the green spaces between all those monuments to a much grander (and busier) imperial past. The city's rhythm has barely shifted from what prevailed before the First World War.

And with time on your hands you can discover some of Edirne's hidden delights, such as the 600-year-old dervishes' mosque, the Muradiye, up by the gypsy quarter on the outskirts of town. It's open only during the hours of prayer, so when you hear the muezzin you need to move sharpish. When I arrived, the place seemed deserted, but the door was ajar and the imam was happy to show me round. The simple interior is adorned with beautiful Iznik tiles. We might be in European Turkey, but the skills which produced such elegant and intensely coloured ceramics were rooted in the plains of Central Asia.