Emir Han

Emir Han is a two-storey inn at the north-eastern corner of Bursa's Grand Mosque (Ulu Cami), in the oldest layer of the historic bazaar. It was built as part of Orhan Gazi's külliye of 1339-1340 to provide income for the complex. According to the TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam, the inn went up in the area where the horse market was set up after the conquest. After Bursa passed to the Ottomans in 1326, it grew quickly as their capital, and the famous Bursa bazaar gradually developed around this inn. The building appears in the records under many names. Bezzazistan, Old Bezzazistan, Bey Hanı, Sultan Hanı and Kervansaray are some of them. The Bursa Site Management office writes that after Yıldırım Bayezid built the new bedesten at the end of the 14th century, the inn was known for a while as the "Old Bedesten". According to the Culture Portal, it was known until 1522 as the Bezzaziye Han, Old Bezazistan or Bey Hanı, and eventually took the name Emir Bey Hanı. The Site Management office describes it as the first Ottoman inn built in Bursa. The TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam regards Emir Han as the first example of the city inn in Anatolian Turkish architecture and explains that this type arose from adapting Seljuk caravanserais to the needs of urban trade. The inn has an almost square plan. According to TDV, the building measures about 45 by 45 metres, with an open courtyard of about 26 by 26 metres in the middle. On both floors the courtyard is surrounded by barrel-vaulted arcades resting on piers, and behind the arcades runs a row of vaulted rooms, each opening onto them through a door. The 36 windowless units on the ground floor were built to store the goods unloaded from caravans in the courtyard. Most of the 38 units on the upper floor had windows and fireplaces, and merchants used them to do business and, when needed, to stay overnight. The Culture Portal gives the number of upper rooms as 37, while TDV and the Site Management office put the total at 74 units. The two floors are linked by two staircases placed symmetrically, in line with the entrance, on the northern side of the arcades. The walls and piers are built in alternating courses of brick and küfeki limestone. The lower parts of the outer facades, which correspond to the storerooms, are blind, while the upper parts carry rows of rectangular windows with pointed relieving arches. The courtyard facades offer an entirely different, lively view thanks to the harmonious proportions of the arcades. The southern wing of the ground-floor arcade is different: here the piers are of cut stone and the arches are round and built in alternating courses. On the upper floor, a dome sits at each of the four corners where the arcade vaults meet. The entrance is on the north, while on the south there used to be a long vaulted stable that projected from the main block. According to the Site Management office, this stable housed the mounts of the merchants in the city. When the Grand Mosque was built, part of the stable was filled with earth and ended up beneath the mosque's north-eastern minaret, which is why the minaret now rises right beside the inn. The Site Management office notes that silk and silk fabrics were traded in the inn. According to TDV's article on the Orhan Gazi Complex, all kinds of goods bought and sold in the city were weighed here, and the weighing fee formed the inn's income. On either side of the gate, three seats set aside for the weighers still survive, so look out for them as you enter the courtyard. Over the centuries the inn burned and was damaged by earthquakes many times. It burned in 1544, was repaired in 1634, lost its gate in the earthquake of 1674, burned again in 1788 and was damaged in the earthquake of 1855. According to TDV, the building reached the 20th century with its northern facade completely collapsed and its upper arcades almost entirely lost. It was also ruined in the great fire that swept the whole bazaar in 1958, and in 1962-1963 it was restored faithfully to its original form. That restoration kept the plan and the original details of the exterior, but the ground-floor arcades were glazed in and the fireplaces in the upper rooms were closed off. Today the inn is a well-kept bazaar building housing many shops and businesses. A good way to see it is to stand in the middle of the courtyard first, taking in the four wings and the position of the corner domes as a whole, and then to climb the stairs to the upper arcades. The cut-stone piers and round arches of the southern wing stand out at once when compared with the pointed brick arches of the other wings. Since the inn is a working bazaar, it can be visited whenever the shops are open. As the Culture Portal notes, the inns district can be reached on foot from the city centre, and Emir Han through the Covered Bazaar. Koza Han, a few steps away, was built according to TDV between Emir Han and the Grand Mosque in the reign of Bayezid II, so seeing the two inns one after the other makes it easy to compare how the bazaar grew in the 14th and 15th centuries. The Hanlar district where Emir Han stands is part of the site "Bursa and Cumalıkızık: the Birth of the Ottoman Empire", inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2014.