Bursa: the mod marketplace

• Our half-hour bus journey into big city Bursa takes us past vast shopping malls, big box stores (nationals and multinationals, like Ikea) and US fast food joints. I begin to wonder what will happen to the older city centre covered bazaars with their multitudes of tiny independent shops and stalls.
• But this afternoon Bursa’s sprawling bazaar was busy enough, its food market busier still. We walk through a series of beautifully restored hans and caravanseris with their Ottoman sandstone-coloured and red brick walls and arches, now all linked with industrial steel and plexiglass overhead covers, which we appreciate given the cool rain we are now having.
• But this is not a bazaar as we experienced them in the east. Everything here is gussied up: the laneways are promenades, there’s no peels, butts and trash, the light too is consistently bright, florescent, industrialized, you can see everything but everything is flat and colours untrue. Here up-market clothing and wedding dress stores have moved in alongside the older gold and jewelry dealers, silk shops, and what seems like hundreds of shoe stores with their same 20-30 shiny models. Crowds gather around piles of freshly unpacked overcoats, sweaters, and even toques – there’s fresh snow on the hills just above the city.
• The rougher, grittier trades, like the blacksmiths and tinsmiths, with their coal-fire forges, cacophony of hammering and blackened hands and faces, all so integral to the older bazaars, are nowhere to be seen or heard.
• We are made especially aware of this in our search for hand-forged kebab skewers which we’ve watched being made in the midst of the eastern bazaars. Here they are nowhere to be found; we can’t even find the usual alleyway of metalworkers. Yet remarkably, when we ask the kebab sellers and even gold and shoe dealers, someone is always nearby who can say precisely where we can find our skewers – more remarkable still because the Bursa tinsmiths are at the furthest edges of the furthest han, beyond the market really (if one can really be ‘beyond’ a market in a Turkish town), well off on their own among a ragtag assortment of furniture, appliance and plumbing shops. But there they are, our skewers, the last eight sitting, somewhat incidentally, in a dusty piece of stovepipe.
• Once a Roman spa centre (and still said to have some 3,000 thermal baths), Bursa became capital of the grand Ottoman empire which spread across the Middle East into Europe, Africa and Asia. Today the city is an industrial centre, producing cars and textiles and processed foods. The box stores and malls lay in wait for the growing suburbanized, car-driving middleclass that seems to be physically engulfing this and many city cores. And yet for all the signs of an excited consumerism, we have been told several times in the past week, and twice today by an engineer and a university graduate, that ‘things are not good in Turkey now’, that jobs are very hard to find.
• A footnote on most of the cities we have passed through: Most seem to have at least doubled their population since the guidebook we use was researched some five years ago. It’s a growth – in main part the result of huge migrations from east to west and country to city – that is most visible to our busing eyes in the ugly tenement building sprawl – freshly painted block units, cement skeletons, foundations – that seems alive and lurching up the nearby hillsides.