Articles > Bursa

Even the buses in Bursa are green, the same pale bluey-green of the Caribbean sea, the colour of the tiles on the Yesil Turbe, the mausoleum of Mehemet I. So are the police information kiosks, which look rather like the TARDIS in “Doctor Who”, itself a British police box, and the public weighing machines, where you put a lira in a slot to be told your weight.

I had wanted to go to Bursa ever since, eight years ago, I saw a photograph of the Yesil Turbe. A tall, simple, octagonal structure with a low lead-covered dome, it stands at the top of a hill set amidst cypresses and dominates the neighbourhood. All the guidebooks complain, in prissy, disapproving tones, that its tiles are not original – that the original ones were destroyed in an earthquake in 1855 and replaced by “much inferior modern” tiles from Kütahya. But, if you have never seen the original ones and none of the writers of these books can have, you won’t be disappointed.

Nearby, but set lower, is the glorious Yesil Cami, the Green Mosque, built by Mehmet I in 1412, the year before he became sole ruler of the Ottoman Empire. This is not green outside, but the interior glows with emerald and deep blue faience. It is surrounded by a little complex of cobbled streets with antique shops and old houses and a few minutes walk away is a fantastic, huge fruit and vegetable market.

I am always amazed by markets in supposedly poor countries. They are so much more abundant than those in richer countries are and suggest that all the locals do is cook and eat. I wondered if, even in a big city like Bursa (population about one million), they could possibly consume this much and what happened to the residue. This market had great mounds of lemons, apricots, peppers, red and green beans, lettuces, artichokes that somebody was busy trimming and acidulating in lemon juice, a vast assortment of fish on big, flat trays, and various useful tools and household implements. I bought a friend a shaving brush for two Turkish lira (less than a pound). He says that you barely need a razor, because the brush is so coarse.

Bursa lives up to its nickname of Yesil Bursa, which means Green Bursa – green is the colour of paradise in Islam. It was chosen by UNESCO as the city in Europe, which “protects its environment in the most original manner and where nature, history, greenery and architecture are unified in an environment of beautiful harmony” (from enjoyturkey.com website). Vegetation and buses apart, it boasts an amazing variety of greens. A row of houses, even modern blocks of flats: each is painted a different shade of green. Those that aren’t green are shades of blue or pink, ochre or terracotta. I was staying in Soganlı, some ten minutes by cab from town, right in the middle of the sea of green of the Botanik Park and just a few minutes walk from the zoo, which is reputed to be the best in Turkey. I usually hate zoos, but this one was surprisingly agreeable with huge enclosures, and most of the animals, apart from a troop of lively monkeys and a sole lion roaring, apparently asleep or out of sight.

Every day crowds flooded into the park to picnic in the open air, grilling meat on little aluminium barbecues that they had brought with them. The park is two and a half kilometres in diameter and seems enormous. It was almost certainly an illusion, but the whole of Bursa seemed to be given over to innocent pleasures. At any given moment, there would be a party going on, either a modest one from the boot of a car or an elaborate affair in one of the restaurants in the Botanik Park. One afternoon, in the garden of the restaurant across the road from my hotel, about fifty fresh-faced teenagers in formal clothes (bow ties for the boys, pretty, frilly white dresses for the girls) ate an elaborate lunch off white tablecloths and then danced to ear-splitting Turkish pop music until the party – which was to celebrate the end of school term - was brought to an abrupt close by a torrential thunderstorm. The downpour was so heavy that over twelve hours later there were still huge puddles on the grass.

The next morning, waiters were up early assembling long trestle tables for some kind of ladies’ luncheon on the lawn of the Otanik Club Hotel where I was staying. This was a luxurious boutique hotel (just 29 rooms, including five suites), built only six years ago, but decorated in the Ottoman style (gauzy bed-hangings, dim lights, artificial flowers, uncomfortable divans on which you were presumably supposed to recline and marble hammam basins in the bathrooms of the suites). It appeared to be a popular venue for conferences as every day I was there, a new influx of smartly dressed businessmen and women poured in, ate an enormous lunch or dinner, did their business and then vanished back to Istanbul or Ankara or wherever they had come from. This seeming innocence may have something to do with how difficult it is to get to Bursa (and the fact that it is impossible to find out anything about how to get there from outside Turkey). It has neither airport nor train station. To get there, you can either take a slow car ferry from Istanbul to Yalova and then a bus from Yalova to Bursa’s enormous bus terminal, which is on the depressing outskirts of town surrounded by factories, or you can take a fast ferry from Yenikapi to Yalova and then the bus. Or you can take a bus the whole way to Bursa from Harem bus station on the Asian side of Istanbul.

Arriving in Istanbul, I was so daunted by this journey (which is not actually nearly as difficult as it sounds) that I got a car and a driver at the airport. This was both expensive and terrifying as the driver drove at over a hundred miles an hour all the way. But, by way of compensation, the scenery en route is beautiful: often as dramatic as Switzerland, green, wooded, mountainous and almost completely empty, the landscape always given an additional haunting twist by the presence of a mosque among the Alpine villas.

While I was in Bursa, I read Orhan Pamuk’s novel, Snow, which is set in Kars, up near the Armenian border and hundreds of miles from where I was. I also spent some time staring at a map of Turkey, frightened by how big the country was. A man in one of the little antique shops in the warren of cobbled streets near Yesil Turbe had given me a colour brochure produced by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. It intended as an introduction to Turkey and it was full of pictures of extraordinary and extraordinarily beautiful places: the dunes in Uchisar-Nevsehir, the Sumela Monastery in Trabzon, the İshak Paşa Palace in Dogubayazit-Ağri and, strangest of all, the Harran plain in Şanlı Urfa. But they were so remote – on the borders of Russia or Iran - that it would take days to get there.

Bursa, just three hours south of Istanbul across the Sea of Marmara and then through wonderful countryside, was closer, more manageable. But I began to think that perhaps once you left Istanbul, you entered a different Turkey. Istanbul was Turkey in a microcosm, a distillation of Turkishness, with a hefty dose of Europe thrown in. Away from the city (Greeks still refer to Istanbul as the polis, a word that means “city” and derives from Constantinople), you enter a completely Turkish world, all the more so because very few people speak anything other than Turkish.

Bursa began its history as Prusias – the Greeks still call it Prusa. It was founded in 183BC by Prusias I, possibly with the help of Hannibal. According to the letters of Pliny the Younger, it was a prosperous town, which declined somewhat during the Byzantine era. Its fortunes, however, revived in 1326 when it was captured by Orhan Gazi, who renamed it Bursa and made it capital of the Ottoman Empire, which it remained until 1369 when the centre of government shifted to Edirne and then almost a century later to Istanbul.

Bursa, the most devoutly Islamic city after Konya, has also been renowned for centuries for its silk weaving. The silkworm was introduced to the Byzantine Empire in the sixth century and the city formed part of the Silk Road. Although all the beautiful fabric is clearly whisked straight off to Istanbul, you can still see traders in the centre of the bazaar checking prices on the electronic display of the stock exchange. All the bath towels in Turkey must come from Bursa. It is also the Detroit of Turkey and the centre of the car industry with Renault, Seat and other car manufacture factories ranged along the roadsides of its outskirts. And it’s the Gstaadt of Turkey with Uludǎg (literally Great Mountain) on its immediate outskirts. Omer Hayaan, the delightful manager of Buyukada’s Splendid Hotel, runs the Ergün Otel (slogan: “Oasis is not only seen in deserts …) there in the winter months, when Turkey’s ski industry comes alive. It’s also - if you can bear another comparison - the Baden Baden of Turkey: its smart leafy suburb of Çekirge (“grasshopper”), where Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, kept a villa, has been renowned as a spa since Roman times.

There the Keravansary Thermal Hotel, “the address of academical massage”, was hosting some kind of beauty therapy conference, (“health and beauty which were coming with water”) offering amongst other therapies, Botox, Liposuction, Thai massage – “you like this delight too much …” warned the promotional leaflet - and something called “regional slim down with lipolis and sellulit treatment”. I had gone there to look at the Eski Kaplica, the oldest and most beautiful baths. They had indeed been restored, but I didn’t think that they were particularly beautiful, or rather that the restoration was. They looked modern and cheap, but perhaps the spa waters made it all worthwhile.

Atatürk certainly rated the waters. He had them piped from Çekirge to the Hotel Çelik Palas where he put up his guests. The hotel, next to Atatürk’s villa, now a museum, is supposedly the best in Bursa, but it must have seen better days. A vast, gloomy, partly Art Deco building, it is a long sticky walk from the centre of Çekirge. On the way, you pass several upmarket and well-stocked liquor shops, which suggest that Çekirge is more westernised than the centre of Bursa. One even sold Maker’s Mark bourbon and Grey Goose vodka.

Çekirge was another world from Cumalıkızık, a village sixteen kilometres east of Bursa on the slopes of Uludag, up a steep, narrow road above a timber yard. Settled 700 years ago by the Turcoman Kiziks, it claims to have been maintained intact since the thirteenth century and is one of the best-preserved examples of early Ottoman rural architecture.

There was water coursing over the cobbled streets, but there were also electricity cables and many satellite dishes. Near the mosque was a pretty coffee house under hanging greenery and a number of men sitting around drinking tea and smoking. While the men sat in the coffee house, their women were busy setting up stalls along the side of the road where they sold hideous pottery ashtrays, weavings and homemade preserves made from enormous blackberries and raspberries grown locally.

I liked Cumalıkızık, with its tumbledown old houses, painted in the usual indigo, green and pink. It was picturesque, though perhaps not terribly comfortable. But I also somewhat mistrusted it. If Cumalıkızık was so wonderfully authentic, why was there no mention of it in John Freely’s Turkey Around The Marmara, a seemingly authoritative guide to the region? It didn’t seem so very different from the complex round the Otanik Club Hotel which looked old, but wasn’t.

But a suspension of disbelief was necessary everywhere. The grinding poverty of Istanbul, its myriad stray cats and dogs, its relentless in-your-face quality – none of these were to be found. The huzun, the Turkish word for melancholy, of which Pamuk writes with so much empathy in his memoir of Istanbul, seems absent from life in Bursa. It is as if everyone there has taken a happy pill. Whether in the busy centre with its death-defying, impossible-to-cross main street and huge shopping mall or in the theme park round the Otantik Club Hotel or the other theme park round the Yeşil Cami, I found myself perfectly content, interested, curious, but always with strange sense of unreality. It didn’t matter how long I spent there – I knew I would never understand it.

Getting there
From Istanbul, then a fast ferry from Yenikapi to Yalova, then a bus to Bursa bus station, then a taxi. Alternatively, hire a car and driver at the airport. This should cost about 350 Turkish lira, but you will have to bargain them down. They will ask for 500 or more. I used Avro Tours which is at Ataturk Airport on the International Arrival Floor; www.avrotours.com.

Articles

• More from Lucretia Stewart