At the foot of the Bithynian Olympus lies a city founded, says tradition, by Cyrus. Philip, the son of Demetrius, gave it to Prusias, King of Bithynia, the friend of Hannibal; Prusias rebuilt it, calling it after himself, and for over two hundred years it was the capital of the Bithynian kingdom. In the first century after Christ it fell into the hands of the Romans; Roman governors took up their abode in Brusa, the younger Pliny described to Trajan the agora, the library, the baths of sulphur, which gave it an honoured place in the civilization of Rome. During the ensuing centuries many men fought and fell for its possession; the cry of battle raged perpetually about its walls. Turks and Christians contended for Brusa, Theodore Lascaris, the Roumanian despot, held it, Orkan ravished it from the Greeks, Timur overwhelmed it with his shepherd warriors from distant Tartary; finally the Turks reconquered it and turned the capital of King Prusias into the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
The soaring minarets, the white domes of mosques and baths, lie amid cypresses and plane-trees at the foot of the mountain. The streams of Olympus, many-fountained like its neighbour Ida, water the town and the surrounding country with such profusion that every inch of ground yields fruit and flowers in tenfold abundance; the hot steam of the sulphur springs diffuses a drowsy warmth through the atmosphere; the city is full of the sound of tinkling fountains and murmuring plane-leaves, and of the voices of black-eyed Turkish children – no wonder if the eagerness of men for its possession drove peace for so many hundred years from its vineyards and olive-groves.
It is said that of the Romans no trace remains. If this be so, the spirit of the Roman builders must have lingered on among Byzantine masons. There is a gateway at the southern side of the town from which part of the stone casing has fallen away, revealing that exquisite brickwork whose secret was known to the Romans only – an entablature of long, narrow bricks, set into arches of complicated pattern, with the sure eye and the even hand that ennoble the commonest materials, and make Roman bricks and plain Roman stonework as beautiful in their way as frieze, or fresco, or marble-casing. Pliny’s baths, however, are gone; the present buildings are of Turkish origin. They lie a little to the east of the town, in fields which vine and olive share with irises and great scarlet poppies. You enter, and find yourself under the dome of a large hall, round the walls of which are railed off compartments where, upon piles of cushions, the bathers rest after the exertion of the bath, smoking a narghileh and drinking a cup of coffee. Beyond this is another and smaller hall, with a fountain of clear cold water in the midst of it, and through various chambers of different temperatures you reach the farthest and hottest of all. The air is thick and heavy with the steam which rises from the blue-tiled basin, where, when the process of washing is over, the Turkish youths swim in the hot water of the sulphur springs, while through the mist the sunlight glimmers down on them from the windows in the dome.
The mosques share the indescribable charm of Brusa – a charm in which the luxuriant fertility of the land and the accumulated arts of many nations bear an equal part. The tomb of Orkan the Conqueror owes its beauty to the Byzantines, for it lies in the church they reared and dedicated to the prophet Elijah. Before the Green Mosque is a fountain, one of those exquisite fountains of Olympus, shaded by huge plane-trees, and protected by a pointed roof rising on delicate columns and arches with the Moorish curve in them; and on the mosque itself, the colour of leaves with the sun shining through them is rivalled by the brilliant green of the tiles which encase the dome, and the tracery of laden branches against the sky by the carving round the doorway, until you cannot tell which is the most successful decorator, man or nature. Sultan Mahmud employed Christian workmen in the mosque he built; its architecture wears a curious likeness to that of the West, and the Christian vines and fig-trees are wreathed round the capitals of the Mohammedan shafts. In the big mosque in the centre of the town the builders seem to have recognized that the beauty of curving roofs and the splendour of coloured tiles could go no further – they have called in Heaven to their aid. The entrance, indeed, is vaulted over, the floor is strewn with carpets, and the walls glow with colour; but the central court is open to the sky, and a fountain plashes under the blaze of light and sunshine which falls through the opening. Round the edge of the basin beggars sit washing their feet, grave elders dip their hands and bathe their faces in the cool water; in the columned darkness beyond, bands of Turkish children play at hide-and-seek between the pillars, so noiselessly that they do not disturb the quiet worshippers and the groups of men chatting in undertones, or drown the delicious sound of water and the whispering of the outer airs which fill the building.
Above the town Olympus rears his lofty head: his feet are planted in groves of plane-trees, among the soaring dark spires of cypresses and the white spires of the minarets, beech thickets cover his flanks, and on his shoulders lies a mantle of snow, which narrows and narrows as the summer climbs upwards, but which never entirely disappears.
As we ascended the mountain on our lean ponies, we felt as though we were gradually leaving Turkey behind us, and climbing up into Greece. The snow still lay low enough (for it was in the early summer) to prevent our reaching the summit, yet we could see over the shoulders of the hills the spurs of the beautiful range of Ida, and where the plain of Troy might be on clearer days, with Lake Aphnitis, the furthest boundary of the Troad, gleaming on its edge – ‘Aphneian Trojans,’ says Homer in his catalogue of warriors, ‘who inhabit Zeleia at the furthest, extremity of Ida, and drink the dark waters of Æsepus.’ We could see, too, the long stretch of Marmora and the peninsula of Cyzicus, whose king met with such dire ill-fortune at the hands of Jason, and though this was hot that Olympus which was crowned with the halls of Zeus, we comforted ourselves by imagining that Homer may have had the slopes of the Bithynian mountain in the eye of his mind when he wandered singing through the Troad. The beech coppices whispered graceful legends in our ears, the glades, thickset with flowers, seemed to us to be marked with the impress of divine feet – it was the Huntress and her train who had stirred the fritillary bells, Pan’s pregnant footing had called the golden crocuses to life, the voices of the nymphs who charmed away Hylas the Argonaut still floated on the air, and through the undergrowth what glimpse was that of flying robe and unloosed shining locks?…We rode upward beyond the region of sheltered, flower-strewn glades, beyond the pines, until we came to rough, stony ground, sprinkled with juniper-bushes – and to the very edge of the snow. The mountain-top was all bare and silent; no clash of battle rises now above the plain of Troy; in the blue peaks of Ida, Œnone’s cries are hushed; Paris is dead, of Helen’s beauty there is nothing but the name; Zeus no longer watches the tide of war from the summit of the Bithynian Olympus, and the nymphs have fled. …
The day was nearly over when we descended, the cypresses of Brusa cast long shadows between the white domes – it was the magic moment when the sun, like a second Midas, turns all he touches into gold. The western sky was a sheet of pure gold, the broad plane-leaves hung in golden patterns upon the boughs, the low light lay in a carpet of gold upon the grass, the very air breathed incantations, and on the lowest slope of the mountain we found Ganymede awaiting us. There he sat under a tree by the roadside; he had clothed himself in the semblance of an old Turkish beggar, and hidden his yellow curls beneath a scarlet fez, and the nectar he offered us was only Turkish coffee; but we knew him, in spite of his disguise, when he put one of the tiny cups into our hands, for no coffee brewed by mortal could have tasted so ambrosial or mingled so divine fragrance with the sweet flowery smell of evening. We sat down on the grass round the primitive brazier – a mere dishful of charcoal set on a shaky iron tripod. The heavenly cup-bearer was well versed in the arts of coffee-making; he kept half a dozen of his little copper pots a-boiling on the tray of charcoal, which he blew to a red glow round them, and when the coffee frothed up over the edges, he poured it in the nick of time into the cups which we held out to him. The sun flooded our Olympian hall of plane-trees with soft light; we lay in grateful silence upon our couch of grass while the coffee bubbled up over the charcoal fire and frothed steaming into our cups. At length we rose, handed our Ganymede some Turkish coins, at which he must have chuckled in his Greek heart, and rode away in the twilight through the streets of Brusa.