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Following Bursa Silk, from Cocoon to Han

Walking through Bursa's historic market, you pass a han named after silk, a bedesten filled with jewellers and shops with silk scarves hanging in their windows. This is no coincidence.

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Following Bursa Silk, from Cocoon to Han

Walking through Bursa's historic market, you pass a han named after silk, a bedesten filled with jewellers and shops with silk scarves hanging in their windows. This is no coincidence. The city's wealth over five centuries rested largely on the cocoon spun by a tiny caterpillar and on the thread drawn from that cocoon. In the Bursa entry of the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, the historian Halil İnalcık says it plainly; the silk trade and silk industry were the main source of prosperity in Bursa. In this piece we follow, in order, the silkworm's journey that begins with a mulberry leaf, the caravans that came from Iran, the cocoon market held in the courtyard of Koza Han, and the places where you can see Bursa silk today.

From mulberry leaf to cocoon

Silk is a natural fibre formed by two fine filaments coated in gum, secreted by the silkworm Bombyx mori during its caterpillar stage. According to a study published on DergiPark, the continuous thread unwound from a single cocoon can reach up to 3000 metres. The caterpillar's only food is the mulberry leaf; the Ministry of Trade's 2019 Silkworm Report also describes mulberry as the silkworm's sole source of food. That is why, wherever there are cocoons, there first has to be a mulberry orchard.

The same report sets out the calendar of today's production. In Turkey silkworms can be reared twice a year, but only the spring rearing is carried out because it is more productive. The hatched silkworms are handed to producers at the beginning of April in the Aegean and Mediterranean regions, and between the end of April and the beginning of May elsewhere. With about a month of feeding and a ten day spinning period, the whole effort takes some forty days. The eggs are prepared in boxes that each contain twenty thousand live eggs, and one box can yield up to 40-44 kilograms of cocoons.

Bursa also has silkworm breeds of its own. According to a 2019 news item from the Bursa Provincial Directorate of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, the project for the Conservation of Silkworm Genetic Resources, launched in 1992 at the directorate's Silkworm Production Centre, keeps eight lines alive, among them Bursa Beyazı (Bursa White) and Bursa Beyazı Desenli (patterned Bursa White). The same item reports that around 150 women work at the centre seasonally and that some 8000 boxes of silkworm eggs are produced there each year.

The caravans from Tabriz

What first made Bursa a silk city was not its own cocoon but raw material from far away. According to the silk entry of the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, silk work in Bursa relied from the start mostly on Iranian sources. Precious raw silk produced in Gilan, Astarabad and Sari, south of the Caspian Sea, was carried to Anatolia by caravans setting out from Tabriz. The figures the encyclopedia gives are striking; a caravan consisted of 300-400 animals and carried on average about 200 loads of silk, each load weighing roughly 154 kilograms.

According to the DergiPark study, the caravans reached Bursa by way of Tabriz and Tokat. The silk changed hands here, part of it woven on the city's looms and part of it sold on to the west. As İnalcık records, in 1479 the value of silk imported from Iran reached 150,000 Venetian gold coins. Genoese, Venetian and Florentine merchants, who all had commercial agents in Bursa, competed with one another to buy silk. In 1501 Maringhi, the Bursa agent of the Florentine Medici family, noted that a single load of silk brought a profit of 70-80 ducats.

Other figures show the city's commercial weight. According to the same entry, in 1487 the annual total of duties levied on imported goods in Bursa reached 140,000 ducats. The same study also recalls that Bursa goods travelled along the Braşov road to Hungary and from there to Eastern and Central Europe. In short, Bursa was a marketplace at the western end of the Silk Road where east met west.

From looms to palaces

Bursa silk was not only bought and sold; it was woven in the city too. According to İnalcık, in 1502 there were more than a thousand looms in Bursa. The encyclopedia's silk entry explains that the city's guild regulations divided silk fabrics into groups such as velvet, kemha, taffeta and satin. These fabrics were distinguished by the number of threads used, by their fineness and by whether they were woven with gold and silver wire.

Bursa kemha and its gold wrought velvet, known as müzehhep, were among the most sought after silks of the age and found a large body of buyers in Europe, Egypt and Iran. The Culture Portal of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism writes that between the 15th and 17th centuries Bursa became the centre of silk fabrics, and that these fabrics, produced under the supervision of the Ottoman palace, both met the palace's needs and adorned the courts of Europe.

The birth of Koza Han

All this trade needed a building. According to the Koza Hanı entry of the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, work began in March 1490 and the building was opened on 29 September 1491. It was commissioned by Bayezid II. The Culture Portal states that the aim was to provide income for his mosque and madrasa in İstanbul, that the architect was Abdül-Ula Bin Pulad Şah and that the master builder was Şuca Bin Karaca. The han was set on the broad plot between the Orhan Gazi Mosque and the Ulu Mosque.

The building everyone now calls Koza Han appears under other names in older sources. The TDV entry lists Yeni Han, Simkeş and İpek Hanı, the Silk Han; the Culture Portal adds names such as Han-ı Cedid-i Evvel, Beylik Kervansarayı and Yeni Kervansaray. The office of the silk commissioner, who collected customs duty from the silk merchants, was also in this han. So this was not merely a place to lodge and store goods, but an official junction where silk was taxed.

The plan is clear and orderly. The two storey building rises around a broad courtyard ringed by arcades resting on stone piers. The number of rooms varies a little between sources; the Culture Portal gives 95 rooms, while the TDV entry speaks of fifty spaces on the ground floor and fifty one or fifty two on the upper floor. According to the Turkish Wikipedia article, silk merchants who came to Bursa for the cocoon trade rented rooms on both floors, using the upper one as office and bedroom and the lower one as a store for their goods. A second courtyard to the east was given over to stables and storerooms.

The small building in the middle of the courtyard is the symbol of the han. An octagonal, domed pavilion masjid rises above the fountain pool beneath it and is reached by a staircase. Speaking to Anadolu Agency in 2024, the historian Prof. Dr. Hasan Basri Öcalan of Bursa Uludağ University described it as one of the two pavilion masjids in Turkey to have survived with their original character. The han was repaired in 1671-72 and in 1785 and underwent a comprehensive restoration in the 1950s. As the Osmangazi Municipality's description puts it, this was for centuries the place where the cocoon market was run.

Bursa spins its own cocoons

In time the raw material began to come from Bursa itself. According to the TDV silk entry, silk production does not appear in 15th century records for Anatolia, but from the 17th century onwards Bursa became known as one of the important centres of silk production. The DergiPark study explains that in the 18th century Anatolian silks were rated above Iranian goods, and that as European weavers took a growing interest in Anatolian cocoons, the country turned from a place that wove silk into a place that produced it.

The 19th century was the century of the machine. The encyclopedia writes that from 1838 onwards steam powered machines called mancınık were imported for reeling silk from cocoons. According to the Ministry of Trade report, the silk reeling industry began in 1845 with a factory of 60 reeling machines set up in Bursa. Hard years followed. An article published in Belleten, the journal of the Turkish Historical Society, explains that the diseases which struck silkworms after 1860 brought the sector to a standstill. According to the same article, the Public Debt Administration, which managed the Ottoman foreign debt and had acquired the right to collect the silk tithe, played a decisive part in the efforts to revive the sector.

From school to cooperative

The most tangible step in the search for a solution was a school. According to the DergiPark study, the first sericulture school supported by the Public Debt Administration opened in Bursa in 1888 under the name Harir Darüttalimi and began teaching with 12 students; similar schools were later set up in Antalya, Amasya, Beirut and Elazığ. The Ministry of Trade report notes that a Sericulture Institute was founded in Bursa to produce domestic silkworm seed, and that silkworm rearing began for the first time to follow scientific methods.

After the founding of the Republic this accumulated knowledge gained a legal framework. According to the report, Law No. 859 of 1926 gave legal protection to seed production and to the care and feeding of silkworms. The first cooperatives, set up in 1940 in Bursa, Bilecik and Adapazarı, merged on 11 May 1940 to form the Union of Bursa Cocoon Agricultural Sales Cooperatives. In 1963 the union founded its own seed production unit, and the report stresses that thanks to this Turkey is one of the few countries able to produce its own silkworm eggs.

Where to see silk today

The first stop is of course Koza Han. The Culture Portal writes that the han still carries on its commercial function and that its courtyard has been laid out as a tea garden. According to the Osmangazi Municipality's description, the shops on the upper floor sell silk fabrics, scarves, shawls and handicrafts. If you are looking for silk woven from local cocoons, you can ask the seller where a piece comes from.

A few steps from the han stands the Bedesten that Yıldırım Bayezid had built at the end of the 14th century. The Culture Portal presents it as the first bedesten built in the Ottoman period; the city's most precious goods were once bought, sold and stored here. Today it is used as the jewellers' bazaar. The World Heritage page of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism describes the Orhan Gazi Complex and the surrounding Khans District, with its great hans, bedesten and bazaars, as the commercial heart of the city since the 14th century. According to the list on Turkish Wikipedia, İpek Han is also counted within this World Heritage component alongside Koza Han.

If you want to see the path from cocoon to cloth step by step, there are two more places. At the Bursa Metropolitan Municipality's City Museum, alongside the lower floor gallery where old craftsmen's shops are recreated, there is a separately designed silk section, which the municipality presents as one of the museum's most striking areas. At the Umurbey Silk Production and Design Centre, which the municipality set up in the spirit of a living museum by restoring an old weaving factory, the process from cocoon to thread and from thread to fabric, together with the looms, is shown with a guide, according to the Ministry of National Education's out of school learning guide.

Practical notes

The Khans District lies in the city centre between the Ulu Mosque and the Orhan Gazi Mosque, and you can see all of it on foot. Mornings are quieter for sitting in the courtyard of Koza Han. Opening days and hours, conditions for group visits and any fees at the City Museum and the silk centre can change, so check the current information on the institutions' official websites. If you are curious about the cocoon season, aim for late spring; in the Marmara region feeding starts between the end of April and the beginning of May and the cocoons are gathered some forty days later. When shopping, the most reliable way to know your silk is to ask the seller what it is made of and where it was produced.

Sources

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