Bursa

The city began as Prusa, founded in the 3rd century BC and named for a Bithynian king, on terraces above the plain where hot springs came out of the mountain. Under Rome and then Byzantium it was known chiefly for those baths, a modest provincial town in the shadow of Nicaea and Constantinople.

Its transformation came in 1326, when Orhan, son of Osman, took the city after a long blockade and made it the capital of the young Ottoman state. For most of the next century Bursa was the centre of the dynasty: Orhan built the first mosque and market complex, later sultans added the Grand Mosque, the Green Mosque and the Muradiye, and Osman and Orhan were buried in the citadel above. Even after the court moved to Edirne and then to Constantinople, sultans continued to be buried here, and the city kept its role as the terminus of the silk road from Iran, with cocoons, raw silk and brocades traded in its caravanserais.

Fire, earthquake and the decline of the caravan trade thinned the city in the 19th century, but silk reeling was mechanised and new mills opened. Bursa changed hands during the Turkish War of Independence and was recovered in September 1922. The republic industrialised it heavily: textiles first, then from the 1960s car and component plants that made the province one of Turkey's manufacturing centres. Migration from the Balkans and later from eastern Anatolia multiplied the population, and the early Ottoman quarters and the village of Cumalıkızık are now inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Bursa thinks of itself as the cradle of the Ottoman state, and the city's identity is bound to its mosques and royal tombs; pilgrims come to Emir Sultan and to the tombs in the citadel as much as tourists do. It is more religious and more conservative in manner than Istanbul, with a strong tradition of Sufi brotherhoods and a calendar that follows Ramadan and the religious holidays closely.

Two crafts define its reputation. Silk gave the city its wealth, and although almost all cocoons now come from elsewhere, silk scarves and brocades are still sold in Koza Han, and the towel and textile trade remains a local speciality. The other is Karagöz, the shadow-puppet theatre of the blunt Karagöz and the pretentious Hacivat, said to have begun with two workmen on a mosque building site in the city in the 14th century.

Green is the city's colour and its nickname, Yeşil Bursa, comes from the plane-shaded parks, orchards and mountain forest around it. Weekend life means breakfast in a village, tea in a han courtyard, a walk in Kültürpark, and in winter the drive or cable-car ride up to the snow. Football is followed through Bursaspor, whose green and white colours appear on shop fronts across the city, and thermal bathing is an ordinary family habit rather than a luxury.

About two and a half million people live in the city and more than three million in the province, making Bursa the fourth most populous city in Turkey. The population is mixed: descendants of Balkan migrants who arrived over the past century and a half, families from the Black Sea and eastern provinces drawn by factory work, and more recent arrivals from Syria and elsewhere.

Industry dominates. Car and commercial vehicle plants and a dense network of component suppliers ring the city, alongside textile mills, food processing and machinery works, and the province is one of the country's largest exporters. Agriculture on the plain is known for peaches, chestnuts, figs and olives, and the mountain draws winter tourism. Wages and living costs are lower than in Istanbul, which keeps drawing people to the city and pushing housing further up the slopes and west into Nilüfer.

The day runs early: factories start before dawn, the bazaar opens mid-morning, and evenings are spent in tea gardens and parks or along the avenues of the newer districts. The city's growth is the main local issue — traffic on the east–west corridor, air quality in winter, pressure on the plain's farmland and the water supply — alongside the ever-present question of earthquake safety in older blocks.

Bursa's best-known contribution is İskender kebap, created here in the 19th century: thin slices of lamb döner laid over squares of pide bread, moistened with a tomato sauce, finished with butter poured sizzling at the table and eaten with yoghurt and a grilled green pepper. It is a lunch dish, and the kebab houses near the Grand Mosque have served it for generations.

Around it sits a settled local repertoire. İnegöl köfte, from a town east of the city, are small dense meatballs of beef and lamb grilled over charcoal. Pideli köfte puts köfte on bread with tomato sauce and yoghurt in the İskender manner. Cantık, a small oval pide topped with minced meat, is a street snack, and the soup houses serve tripe soup late at night. From the surrounding towns come Mustafakemalpaşa tatlısı, a syrup-soaked dessert made with fresh unsalted cheese, and the grape and mulberry products of the plain.

The mountain supplies the sweets. Chestnuts from the slopes of Uludağ are candied in syrup as kestane şekeri and sold in boxes everywhere in the centre, also appearing as a purée in puddings and ice cream. Breakfast is a local institution, especially in Cumalıkızık, where village tables are laid with eggs cooked in butter, honeycomb, clotted kaymak, home-made jams, olives and cheese, washed down with tea poured until the guests stop drinking.