Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [182]
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 Yelıil (Green) Bursa, for the rivers and rivulets of icy water running down the slopes of Ulu Dağ (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 color. 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 civilization, including the theater. 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 favorite. 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 caravansaries 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 likely 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 vigor and vision of Ahmed Vefik Pasha is an equally energetic businessman and collector named Ahmet Erdönmez. Almost single-handedly in the past decade