Guest User
October 18, 2025
Safranbolu is a UNESCO World Heritage Site city, with a very distinctive – and beautiful – Ottoman architecture consisting of white colored full-wood, timber and stone (for the ground floor) houses in the Cukur market area. Some of those traditional wooden houses, belonging to well-to-do trader families, have been converted into B&Bs, inns and boutique hotels. One of them is Kolgasi Konagi Hotel, which sits right beside the town’s police station on Hukumet Street. Just below is the Cukur market area, which is the main UNESCO World Heritage zone. The ground floor keeps the original receiving-entrance area as the lobby and shares it with the dining room, converted from the original storage room. Originally, ground floors didn’t have windows since they were made of stone and tried to look like garden walls. You walked up the very narrow-stepped wooden stairs to get to three rooms on the first floor and then (I presume) another three rooms on the 2nd floor. Which meant schlepping your luggage up the stairs with the extremely narrow steps. The rooms are rather large, typical of the rooms back then. There were small windows all around (we had a corner room so three small windows on each side), and wooden floors and ceilings. Of course there’s no ac but they do have ceiling fans – we were here in October so there was no need for a ac. Beds as expected are wooden framed. As in the old mansions, there’s usually a cushioned seating area around at least one side of the room. There’s no wardrobe cabinet – instead, you had one of those exposed hangracks with hangers. There’s a 6 cuft ref and above it was a smallish TV – but no English channels. Lots of pillows and duvets. What’s unusual was that they still used the old step-in T&B space as the modern T&B – so you had to step over to get to it. It was very very narrow but long – so as soon as you stepped over, you had the toilet bowl, then a few feet towards the middle was the tiny sink-washbasin and then to the other end was the shower area. No complaint with the bowl or the shower but the space was so narrow and the sink was similarly narrow so no way you could wash without spraying water on the floor. Dinner and breakfast were relatively modest. For dinner, they served fried chicken with wild mountain rice and French fries. They also had a large bowl of vinegrette salad, plus some sweet choco curd or something for dessert. For breakfast (8 am, no earlier), they had a buffet spread. It was all veggies and cheeses plus various spreads – no meats of whatever kind. They also had hardboiled eggs and three types of breads. No fruits or desserts as well. Quite an experience – you really got a feel for how the rich lived 150 years ago. Note: we did find some of the pictures on Trip Advisor quite deceiving – there is no swimming pool, or large garden-veranda area, or balconies. We wondered which hotel those came from.
