Why it looks like this

The Ottomans captured Bursa in 1326 and made it their first capital. The city they built — mosque complexes, bath houses, and the covered bazaar with its silk-trading khans — sat on the lower slopes of Uludağ, the 2,500-metre mountain that fills the southern horizon.

The mountain still writes the map: Bursa cannot grow south, so it has stretched east and west into a long ribbon along the slope, streets zigzagging uphill until the gradient stops them.