Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [181]
In 1396, Beyazit was faced by an army of a reputed one hundred thousand crusaders. They had invaded his Balkan territories, and he promised his God that he would build twenty mosques if he were granted victory, but having disposed of the crusaders with ease at the Battle of Nicopolis (in Bulgaria), he began to have second thoughts; twenty mosques seemed a tall order. His architect came up with a solution: the Great Mosque of Bursa was one of the largest structures the Turks had ever built. It had more domes than any other mosque in the sultan’s territories and their number was at least an allusion to the terms of the pledge. (John Ash notes that “architectural historians have generally been unkind about the results, finding the mosque clumsy.… This may be true, but it will not concern an unprejudiced person who has spent some time in Beyazit’s mosque.”) Later, Beyazit went head to head with Timur (Tamerlane) and became Timur’s captive. Rumor has it that he became Timur’s slave, and after Timur pillaged and burned Bursa, Beyazit killed himself. The Yeşil Cami and Yeşil Türbe in Bursa are the mosque and tomb of Mehmet I, and Murad II is buried in the pretty Muradiye Cemetery complex, probably the most peaceful spot in the entire city.
Cornucopia published a special thirty-six-page feature on the city that gave the Ottoman Empire its first capital, “Bursa: Home of the Sultans” (2007). I urge readers to order a copy as the accompanying photos reveal just how gorgeous Bursa’s architectural gems truly are, and the other essays in the special issue are essential reading (cornucopia.net). This piece is the opening essay of the special section.
HEATH W. LOWRY is Mustafa Kemal Atatürk Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies at Princeton University. He contributed this piece to Cornucopia: The Magazine for Connoisseurs of Turkey and is also the author of numerous books, including Ottoman Bursa in Travel Accounts (Indiana University/Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies, 2003), The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (SUNY, 2003), and Fifteenth Century Ottoman Realities: Christian Peasant Life on the Aegean Island of Limnos (Eren, Istanbul, 2002).
ALONG THE skirts of the Bithynian Mount Olympus (known for half a millennium by the Ottomans as Keşiş Dağı, 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 three hundred 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 fifty thousand. Today it is a sprawling metropolis of over 1.5 million which is home to Turkey’s automotive industry and still a major center of textile production, although the famed Bursa towels have long since outpaced its renowned silks. As for its minarets, which really only numbered three hundred in the writings of travelers, they are still there, though one sometimes has trouble spotting them amid the apartment blocks and stores that mar what was once a vista of dozens of graceful spires rising above the maze of two-story lath-and-plaster dwellings.
Equally famed were 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 kilometers of mulberry and fruit orchards to Bursa and its baths.
By the end of the nineteenth century the journey was made somewhat easier