Bursa is Turkey’s fourth city and an early Ottoman seat
Bursa, capital of its namesake province in northwestern Turkey, ranks as the country’s fourth-most populous city and second in the Marmara Region after Istanbul. Roman Bithynia already knew the site; Pliny the Younger wrote of it to Emperor Trajan in the early second century.
People lived at the Ilıpınar Mound near Bursa around 6000 BC, and King Prusias I of Bithynia later built Prusa at the foot of the Bithynian Olympus, today's Mount Uludağ. Pliny the Younger wrote to Trajan about choosing a spot for new baths at Prusa where a once-handsome mansion lay in ruins. A Roman woman's silver toiletry set found in Bursa has sat in the British Museum since 1913. Under Byzantium, Justinian I built a palace there, and by the mid-6th century Prusa was already famous for silk.
Captured from the Byzantines in 1326, Bursa became the early Ottoman capital, gaining hospitals, madrasas, caravanserais such as the Koza Han, and the first official Ottoman mint. Even after the court moved on, Bayezid I built his mosque complex there between 1390 and 1395 and the Grand Mosque between 1396 and 1400. As a silk hub the city passed goods from Ming China to Genoa and Florence, and the mausoleums of the early sultans still stand there. Some stories claim the shadow-puppet pair Karagöz and Hacivat were 14th-century residents.
Romaniote Jews lived in Bursa before 1326, joined after 1492 by Sephardic exiles whose Ladino overtook Judeo-Greek; the Jewish population reached about 3,500 before the First World War but fell to 140 by the early 21st century. Armenians grew prominent in the silk trade from the 17th century. From 1877, Muslims fleeing the Russo-Turkish War arrived from Rumelia, Romania and Bulgaria and settled in quarters laid out by the governor Ahmed Vefik Pasha.
Greek troops took Bursa in their summer offensive of 1920 during the Greco-Turkish War. Silk factories, foreign-owned since the 19th century, later gave way to broader textiles, car manufacturing and agricultural industry, and the nickname Yeşil Bursa, Green Bursa, honours its parks and the forests around it.
Source: Bursa
