Tophane & Bursa

“An old mosque courtyard in Bursa, / Water chattering in the little fountain…” So begins Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s poem ‘Time in Bursa’. But can time really flow differently in a city? Look down over the plain from the Tophane hillside and you can hear the answer in the sound of water, in the silence of the domes; for Bursa is the city where a state took its first steps, the first city ever to be called its “capital”…