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By Root 988 0

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 labor 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 sixteenth-century Balibey Han, a unique four-story 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 favorite 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 travelers, 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 around 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 center moved west, first to Dimetoka and Edirne in the Balkans in the early 1360s, then to Istanbul in 1453, Bursa remained a center 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 Bayezit, at the heart of the present-day city. To its east is the Yeşil Cami complex erected