Only an hour by bus away from Bursa the former Nikäa, a country town with the same name, is situated on the shore of the İznik Lake. Hard to imagine, that this one horse town was once province capital and in the 13^th  century even capital of the Byzantine empire – during the period of the conquest of Constantinople  by the Latin crusaders the exile regime of the Lascarides ruled here. A Roman theatre from the period of the emperor  Hadrian, formidable city walls – much too large today for the settlement which shrunk – and the church Hagia Sophia still present the history of the city before the Turkish took over.

The place in the church history proves how prominent it used to be, because even 2 important councils were held here: The consubstantiality of Christ, the fact then that he was a human being and God in one person was determined at the 1^st ecumenical council in the year of 325. Yet, the 7^th ecumenical council in 787 concluded the period of the Iconoclasms, the ban of pictures, in the Byzantium Empire.

However, also the Ottomans, who attained the reign over the city in 1331 under the sultan Orhan, left important constructions behind. The Yeşil Cami, the green mosque dating back 1391, is named after the gorgeous turquoise faiences of the minaret, its lavishly decorated niche of prayer made out of marble is the earliest Ottoman exemplar of its kind. The archaeological museum in the nearby Nilüfer-Medrese, which was founded in 1388, displays not only outstanding examples of the faience production of İznik, but also a rich collection of coins from Asian Minor.