Along the skirts of the Bithynian Mount Olympus (known for half a millennium by the Ottomans as Kesis Dagı, or Monk’s Mountain), lies what remains of the first capital of the early Ottoman state. Once home to the most flourishing silk industry of the Middle East and fabled for its 300 minarets, it was a city dedicated in equal parts to commerce and religion. From the fourteenth until the early twentieth century, its inhabitants never numbered more than 50,000. Today it is a sprawling metropolis of over 1,500,000 which is home to Turkey’s automotive industry and still a major centre of textile production, although the famed Bursa towels have long since outpaced its renowned silks. As for its minarets, which really only numbered 300 in the writings of travellers, they are still there, though one sometimes has trouble spotting them amid the apartments blocks and stores that mar what was once a vista of dozens of graceful spires rising above the maze of two-storey lath-and-plaster dwellings.

Equally famed was its natural hot springs, known in Turkish as kaplıca, which abound in the western suburb of Çekirge, and which by the end of the eighteenth century had been discovered by a handful of adventurous Europeans, who built a number of small spa hotels, immediately attracting parties of hardy visitors. This meant that Bursa soon became a popular weekend retreat for Europeans living in Istanbul, who sailed for eight to twelve hours to the port town of Mudanya on the Marmara Sea and were then transported by horse-drawn wagons over the forested hills and through fifteen kilometres of mulberry and fruit orchards to Bursa and its baths.

By the end of the nineteenth century the journey was made somewhat easier by the construction of a narrow-gauge railway connecting the two towns. Even that trip, however, was not without adventure: travellers reported how at steep grades along the way the male passengers were asked to disembark and walk on foot to the brow of the next hill, as the little engine didn’t have quite enough steam to get itself and a full load of riders over the hills that surrounded the fertile Bursa plain.

Today, a pleasant (and quick) way to get from Istanbul to Bursa is the new fast ferry service from Yenikapı (along the sea walls of Istanbul) to Mudanya in a surprisingly quick seventy-five minutes. From there one takes a bus or taxi to Bursa and the whole trip takes less than two hours. If you travel with one of the several dozen books written by nineteenth-century visitors in hand, you will end up fully disoriented. For in place of the forested hills that once gave way to the vast Bursa plain, covered as far as the eye could see by plantations of mulberry trees (the leaves of which fed the silkworms on which the city’s economy depended), the hills are now covered with the villas of Bursa residents who have escaped the city. In place of the mulberries are factories, outlet stores, car dealerships and row upon row of not always attractive apartment blocks. Such is the price of progress.

However, as one approaches the city, it is still possible to imagine how it came to be known as Yesil (Green) Bursa, for the rivers and rivulets of icy water running down the slopes of Ulu Dag (Great Mountain) – the not-so-romantic name by which the Mountain of the Monks has been known since 1925 – still feed the remaining foliage and convey a sense of what once was. Against the backdrop of the forested mountain itself, green is still the prevailing colour. Although at the rate human settlement is moving up the mountain, that too may soon be a thing of the past.

One of the less pleasant aspects of modern life is the plethora of automobiles, which make getting around (let alone parking) an exciting and often frustrating task. The twenty-first-century visitor is advised to leave the driving to the hundreds of bright yellow taxis which always find a way through the traffic jams threatening to surpass even the congestion of Istanbul.

Bursa as described by visitors in earlier centuries was a warren of small, often dead-end streets with no apparent rhyme or reason to their makeup. What larger streets (dare I say boulevards) there are today are indirectly the result of the horrendous earthquake of 1855, which destroyed most of the city, and in whose wake an energetic governor, Ahmed Vefik Pasha, redesigned the grid and added what passes for main thoroughfares today. He also reconstructed most of the damaged historic monuments and introduced the residents to other aspects of Western civilisation, including the theatre. Indeed, Ahmed Vefik truly deserves credit as the father of the modern city. Without his tireless effort it is difficult to imagine what Bursa would look like today.

After countless visits in forty-plus years, Bursa still remains a personal favourite. I never come here without finding something new – not such a difficult task given that there are still well over a hundred minarets.

Should one tire of mosques, the massive courtyard caravansarays that once housed the city’s artisans and manufacturers, including the impressive Koza (Silk) Han, with its dozens of venues offering goods made from the city’s famous silks, are there to be visited. Anyone who thinks that silk is not still an important aspect of the city’s life will be quickly disabused of the idea with a visit to this site. Where by the late fourteenth century the city was home to several dozen silk and wool merchants from Venice, Genoa and Florence, today buyers are more like to fly into the city in the morning, place their orders and return to their Western European offices by late afternoon.

Today’s answer to the vigour and vision of Ahmed Vefik Pasha is an equally energetic businessman and collector named Ahmet Erdönmez. Almost singlehandedly in the past decade he has goaded and shamed the city fathers into taking a long-overdue interest in protecting what remains of Bursa’s Ottoman heritage. He began by creating the Kent Müzesi (City Museum). This is a labour of love containing a street in which the shops of craftsmen of an earlier era have been beautifully re-created. He was also involved in the restoration of the city walls and, most recently, with the restoration of the Bali Bey Han, a unique four-storey edifice which clings to the slopes of the walled city. Indeed, my first stop on every visit to the city is the Kent Museum, where I learn from Ahmet Bey what has been done since my last visit.

Among the things that are a must for every first-time visitor to Bursa is a visit to one of the city’s kaplıcas (hot springs). My personal favourite is the Eski Kaplıca (Old Hot Springs), just below the Hüdavendigâr Mosque in Çekirge. Originally a Roman bath, today’s structure was built in the fourteenth century by the third Ottoman ruler, Sultan Murad Han, known as Hüdavendigâr (the Ruler). We know of its past from nineteenth-century travellers, who described the Roman mosaics that lined the large bathing pool in the men’s section until the 1855 earthquake. In the rebuilding, the mosaics were covered by the marble one sees today. Meticulously maintained, this bath has separate sections for men and women; the women’s section (even without the mosaic floor) is reportedly just as pleasant as the men’s.

This bath was renowned in Byzantine times as a cure for leprosy and by the Ottomans for syphilis. One Greek legend has it that the city was founded by the leprous daughter of a Byzantine emperor who was miraculously cured after a visit to the hot springs. Fortunately, I am unable to vouch for the accuracy of these claims. What I can attest to, however, is that after a busy day of exploring Bursa, there is nothing better for my spirits than a pleasant couple of hours „ in the Eski Kaplıca. The Kervansaray Termal Hotel forms a U shape round these baths, and one can actually walk directly from the hotel into the baths.

Bursa was conquered following a ten-year siege in 1326 by Orhan Gazi, two years after the death of his father, Osman, to become the first capital of the fledgling Ottoman polity. When the Byzantine official who surrendered the city was asked by the new ruler why they had finally capitulated after holding out so long, he replied: “Your father had taken all our villages, and our former peasants who live in them are happy. We, too, wanted to share that happiness.” Therein lay one of the secrets of Ottoman success: good treatment and a fair tax burden (often less than under a strapped and weakened Byzantium) made it possible to rule a population most of whom shared neither the religion, the language nor the culture of their new rulers.

Writing some fifteen years after the fall of Bursa, the Byzantine chronicler Nicepheros Gregoras described the melding of the region’s Muslim and Christian populations: “Therein all the Bithynians came together, all the barbarians who were of his [Orhan’s] race, and all the mixobarbaroi [offspring of mixed Greek and Turkish unions] and in addition all those of our race whom fate forced to serve the barbarians.” This must have accounted for the quick conversion of Byzantine “Prusa” into Ottoman “Brusa”, and then to the name which has come down today as “Bursa”.

Even after the Ottoman centre moved west, first to Dimetoka and Edirne in the Balkans in the early 1360s, then to Istanbul in 1453, Bursa remained a centre of learning and in many ways „ the spiritual core of the state. This is reflected in the large number of surviving medreses (theological seminaries), ever-present mosques, and the ornamental türbes (domed tombs) of the first six rulers, all of whom were buried in Bursa, and in the signs of royal patronage still evident throughout the city.

Sultanic mosques abound, including the unique twenty-domed Ulu Cami (Great Mosque) built by Yıldırım Bayezid, at the heart of the present-day city. To its east is the Yesil Cami complex erected by his son Çelebi Mehmed (Mehmed I). To the west, in Çekirge, is the beautiful complex of buildings endowed by his father, Murad Hüdavendigâr. It includes what is today known as the Hüdavendigâr Camii (Ruler’s Mosque), which was designed as a multi-purpose building (as were most early Ottoman mosques), containing under one roof a zaviye (hostel for dervishes), a medrese and the actual sanctuary itself. Next to it still stands the imaret, where twice a day those who worked in the complex, students of the medrese, dervishes staying at the zaviye, travellers (rich and poor) and the local indigent were fed free of charge. No longer in existence is the hospital. In its garden is the tomb of Murad himself and, lower down the hill, the Eski Kaplıca. In the centre of the town once stood an imposing han, also endowed by this ruler, as were numerous others built by his descendants (which do survive). In short, here is an encapsulated version of early Ottoman history.

The story it tells is not the one recorded by the sixteenth-century chroniclers, who lived at a time when the dynasty had already achieved its aspiration to be recognised as the successor of the earlier great Sunni (Orthodox) Ummayid, Abbasid and Seljuk empires. As part of that goal the sixteenth-century rulers had fully embraced orthodoxy (this also set them apart from their eastern enemy, the Shii Safavids in Iran), and the early history of their enterprise was conveniently rewritten accordingly.

Far from what they had become by the time these mythologised eulogies were penned, initially the fourteenth-century sultans ruled over a state the overwhelming majority of whose inhabitants were Christians, reflected in the fact that the services of the hospitals and soup kitchens endowed by Murad Hüdavendigâr and other rulers were available to subjects regardless of religion. This largesse impressed several European visitors.

The facilities provided for the Muslim mystics, the dervishes, which included „ free lodging in the zaviyes and free food in the imarets, likewise reflected their key role in conquests of the period. Their spiritual leaders, known as Babas (Fathers) or Sultans (Rulers), led the Ottoman troops into battle, and it was the moral authority they conferred on early Ottoman rulers that enabled them to maintain the loyalty of the semi-nomadic Turcoman tribesmen whose support was key to early Ottoman success.

It is no coincidence that the oldest Ottoman document to survive is the foundation charter, or vakfiyye, drawn up by Orhan Gazi in 1324, endowing a zaviye for these wandering mystics, and placing its management in the hands of a converted freed eunuch named Sharaf al-din Muqbil. The document’s careful wording (reflecting the fact that the eunuch had no offspring) states that he will be succeeded as administrator of the foundation by the ablest of the children of the Christian slaves who serve the facility. This was the milieu within which Christians and Muslims, slave and free alike, mingled. It was this milieu which served to create the new race of Ottoman Turks, whose heritage is still so visible.

Viewed against this background, the surviving early Ottoman monuments of Bursa take on a special meaning. Their scope and numbers are truly impressive, even more so when we factor in the series of man-made and natural disasters of the past half millennium. Three times Muslim armies occupied, looted and burnt up half the city (Tamerlane’s army in 1403, the forces of Karamani Mehmed in 1413 and the rebels known as the Celalis in 1609–12). Earthquakes, always a bane in Bithynia (which lies across a major fault line), frequently took their toll as well. Fires, a perennial problem in a city whose residences were built primarily of lath and plaster, frequently ravaged whole quarters. Finally, in the twentieth century, the rejection of everything Ottoman in the new Republic of Turkey meant the destruction or neglect of monuments that stood as silent reminders of the past one was not supposed to remember. What is amazing is less how much is gone than how much has survived. No visitor to Turkey can ever really gain a feel for the wonders of the Ottoman past without a visit to Bursa. u

Heath W Lowry, Atatürk Professor of Ottoman and

Modern Turkish studies at Princeton University, is the author of The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (Suny) and Bursa in Travel Accounts (Indiana Univ.)