Uludağ: the back story

About Uludağ: the back story

By the ULTIMATE Ski Resorts Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Uludağ, the “Great Mountain” above Bursa, rises to 2,543 metres from the edge of the Marmara plain. The ancients knew it as Mysian Olympus; Byzantine monks filled its forests with monasteries; and since the 1930s it has been Türkiye’s favourite winter playground, reached by one of the world’s longest gondolas from the city below.

Mysian Olympus

Long before skis, this was a holy mountain. Herodotus wrote of it as Olympus in the 5th century BC, and the geographer Strabo called it Mysian Olympus, the sacred peak on the border of Mysia and Bithynia. From the 8th to the 10th century, the resort’s own history of the mountain records, it was one of the great monastic centres of Byzantium; tradition holds that there were 147 monasteries in its forests when Bursa became the first Ottoman capital in 1326.

The Monk’s Mountain becomes Uludağ

Under the Ottomans the peak was known as Keşiş Dağı, the Monk’s Mountain, and in 1925 it received its modern name, Uludağ, the Great Mountain. The Bursa Mountaineering Club followed in 1933, the first ski hut in 1935 and the Büyük Otel in 1939. In 1946 Mehmet and Fatma Beceren opened the mountain’s first private business, the hotel that still stands at the heart of the 1st Hotels Zone.

The mountain of the ancients, a cable car above an Ottoman capital, and the oldest ski resort in Türkiye.

A national park and a cable car

Uludağ became a national park in 1961, and in 1963 the first cable car and ski lift opened. The modern gondola from Bursa’s Teferrüç station, 8.8 kilometres long, opened in 2014 and climbs through the pine forest to Sarıalan and the hotel zone in about 22 minutes, according to the resort operator.

One pass, two hotel zones

Today the lifts are united under a single RFID skipass: 24 lifts and 43 pistes across the 1st and 2nd Hotels Zones, from gentle nursery slopes beside the hotels to the higher runs served by the Karkay chairlift. The hotels themselves sit at the foot of the pistes, many with their own lifts, ski rooms and schools, and most work on a full-board or all-inclusive basis.

Every budget

Uludağ welcomes everyone. Family-run hotels such as Beceren and Fahri keep the old mountain spirit, all-inclusive resorts such as Bof and Kaya suit families, and Ceylan Splend’or, an Autograph Collection hotel, brings sushi, a whisky lounge and a 1,550 m² spa to the 2nd Zone. Below, in the Kirazlıyayla forest, Swissôtel Uludağ Bursa occupies a restored modernist sanatorium.

Our advice: come midweek, when the slopes are quieter than at weekends, buy your pass online, and carry chains if you drive. Then spend a day in Bursa for the covered bazaar, the Koza Han silk market, İskender kebab and candied chestnuts.

Uludağ in brief

From Uludağ Kayak Merkezi A.Ş., the resort’s official operator (uludaginfo.com), October 2026.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Uludağ: the back story before you go.