Cathedrals of the Flesh

by Alexia Brue

  I raised an eyebrow, playing along.

  'I am just now excavating a Turkish bath in this very garden.' Kemal spoke slowly and clearly, emphasizing all the adverbial words like a posh Englishman. I made a mental note to ask if he'd spent his formative years at Eton.

  'Last month I started to dig over there,' he said, pointing to a large rectangular hole in the ground covered by a bamboo roof about fifty yards away. 'I wanted to make a pottery studio using the walls that had been my sister's house, but I needed to dig deeper in the ground so it would be cool like a cellar in the summertime. After a day of digging, one of my workmen hit a floor about six feet under this ground level we see today. I had no idea what it was, so we kept digging a broader swath to see just how big this floor might be. Then we hit what I'm sure must be drainpipes.' He paused so I could register the import of this discovery. 'A most incredible thing. The drainpipes crisscross the floor. Surely it must be some kind of very old Turkish bath. What else could account for the presence of all of these drainpipes?'

  'Well, that sounds entirely plausible,' I said, assuming the mantle of distinguished archaeology professor. 'Can I have a look?' Seven years ago, I'd taken a semester of Roman art and archaeology. Though I'd napped through most of the interminable slide shows, I'd perked up during the Roman bath section. And in my hazy recollection, drainpipes did not a bath make.

  'Yes, yes, of course. So, now, really, what an incredible coincidence to meet. Have you read The Celestine Prophecy? A most amazing book. Meeting you is something straight out of that book.' I apologized for not having read The Celestine Prophecy but agreed that it was a huge coincidence our interests should so overlap.

  'Come. Let's have a look at the thing.' He jumped up, and the rest of the tea party, still discussing the soccer deaths, looked over at us.

  Kemal, with what I'd later see as a charming social ineptitude, wasn't going to explain our field trip to his guests, but sensing the question marks on everyone's faces, I said, 'Kemal and I are going on an archaeological excursion.'

  I followed his long, sandaled legs to the last of the houses on the semicircle.

  'Are all these houses yours?' I asked.

  'For the time being, yes,' he responded with the indifference of someone either too rich or too eccentric to care.

  We reached the 'dig area.' To the untrained eye, it was a gaping pile of rubble covered by a lean-to bamboo roof. To my untrained but optimistic eye, it looked like the contours of a modest bath built sometime during the reign of Justinian, circa fifth century A.D. This made sense, because Tuzla's first settlers were fifth-century Byzantine monks, according to Mehmet. Kemal waved to the two workers and greeted them: 'Selâm. Ne var ne yok?y One guy, in dirt-covered jeans and a T-shirt, removed a wheelbarrow full of debris from the pit. The other guy swung a pickax at random parts of the floor in what looked more like an anger management exercise than a careful attempt to unearth buried booty.

  'Meet my archaeologists,' Kemal declared proudly. Call me conservative, but their methods seemed crude, more exorcism than excavation. There were no field notebooks normally kept by archaeologists, no division of the area into trenches and buckets.

  Kemal jumped down into the pit and offered me his hand. This was the fast-paced, intuitive world of archaeology I had dreamed of since Raiders of the Lost Ark. Here on the shores of the Marmara there were no permits to file and no authorities to meddle. Hey, Kemal and I were the authorities. We stood side by side, six feet below modern ground level, in a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot moldy pit strewn with debris, discussing things we knew nothing about, comparing ill-founded theories, and planning how to proceed.

  Kemal touched a pile of terra-cotta tablets stacked one on top of the other.

  'Now what would these be? If this is the floor that we're standing on, why would rows of little pillars line the floor?'

  'Well,' I said, trying not to sound too pleased with myself, 'these piles of terracotta tablets were called pilae. The Romans invented pilae to support the floor over the hypocaust system — that's the underground heating system. So here in this hypocaust area, the heat from the furnace would float around and heat the floor laid on top of the pilae. Ancient radiant heat. Pretty ingenious, eh?' I was surprised that all this was waterlogged in my brain. Why didn't I remember more important things like my bank balance or the birthdays of friends?

  Kemal marveled at my intelligence or something on the floor. 'So you agree this really is an ancient bath?'

  'Yes. But what else was in the area during ancient times? Why would the Byzantines have built a bath in this particular location?' I asked.

  'This area is called Monaster, because of the fifth-century monastery that was here. Actually, my stone house was the last building used as a monastery. Just think — from monks to me.' He winked at me. 'Oh yes, and this area used to have productive salt mines. Tuzla actually means "with salt."'

  Kemal and I invented an elaborate theory that this was once the bath for the workers of the Tuzla salt mines. After a long day of collecting salt under dark and claustrophobic conditions, Greek-speaking workers found warmth, light, heat, and rest in this little jewel of a bathhouse under the watchful eyes of the celibate monks. The bath's location near the salt mine explained why the design was small and functional as opposed to the more grandiose marble-paved hamams in central Istanbul.

  'Do you think there is any way I could get the bath up and running again?' Kemal asked. 'How much do you think it would cost?'

  'I really have no idea. I suppose it depends if you want to restore it with the original heating system or if you want to refurbish it as a more modern hamam. You could reline the walls with marble, the same marble you've redone the house in, and then put in some sort of furnace. It could be really lovely with just a very simple restoration. Or you could mount a dome on top and maybe install some windows in the side to look out onto the Marmara.' A daydream took shape in my head as I suggested these alternatives to Kemal. Maybe Marina and I could do a practice run restoring Kemal's ancient bath. With all these empty houses, living on-site certainly wouldn't be a problem.

  Suddenly Kemal's excitement turned to paranoia. 'You're not going to tell anyone about this?' he asked. I was demoted from co-developer to potential informer.

  'Kemal, what do I look like, the archaeological police?' He narrowed his light blue eyes. Was it, I wondered, the trench coat? 'If you let me help you excavate the bath, I promise I won't tell the authorities,' I teased, charmed by Kemal's suspicion.

  We returned to the tea party; Baksim reminded Kemal, to my complete surprise, that I might be interested in renting his city house in Ortaköy.

  'I will give Baksim the key so you can go have a look tomorrow,' Kemal said to me.

  We had emptied our teacups, and the sun lowered across the water. It was time to make haste back to Istanbul.

  Kemal waved good-bye and said, 'I hope you'll like my house.' Baksim, Mehmet, and I lingered for a few minutes, playing with dogs. A moment later Kemal intercepted us at the gate, his face even more drawn and serious than before. 'Don't tell anyone what you saw here, OK?' Baksim and Mehmet tried not to laugh; apparently Kemal was prone to these mini—anxiety attacks. I kissed him on both cheeks and promised not to turn him in. He blushed and said something about 'necessary precautions.'

  On my second day in Istanbul, I'd met a charmingly neurotic man with an ancient bath in his backyard who was going to rent me his 'city' house. In the process of meeting all these new people, we had discussed personal situations — I knew all about Mehmet's wife and Baksim's prospects, and I'd gleaned that Kemal was unattached. Not once had I mentioned that I had a serious boyfriend whom I lived with back in New York City. I just put off mentioning Charles, again and again, until it crept up on me as something I was hiding. But the omission was easy enough to justify. Being in Istanbul was a delicious adventure, and I wanted to put a protective white sheet over anything that reminded me of home.

  Just when I thought the day c
ould not be any more perfect or serendipitous, Baksim said, 'Let's just say a very quick hello to my aunt and uncle before heading back into Istanbul.'

  We ventured from Kemal's bohemian fantasy world to the manicured, refined world of Mehmet's uncle and aunt, where tea appeared magically, sugar cubes and all, and drawing room conversation followed the predictable lines of weather, traffic, and tennis. His aunt and uncle were the Turkish equivalent of Connecticut WASPs or English landed gentry. They were tidy, genteel people in their late fifties, the kind of people who wake up early, play tennis, and have card games with the neighbors. Baksim's uncle and I quickly fell into a conversation about hamams. One thing I immediately noticed about Turks was their highly extroverted interest in other people. Turkish people hold up much more than their end of the conversation. It was effortless and completely delightful to socialize in this country.

  'I wonder very much what is left of hamam culture,' Baksim's uncle said wistfully. 'Well, there's someone I know with whom you should definitely speak. Her name is Tiilay Tascioglu, and she wrote a gorgeous book called The Turkish Bath several years ago. It explains the origins of hamams and hamam culture and has some magnificent drawings and photographs. She's a very accomplished woman, and I'm sure she'd love to meet someone with similar interests. Hold on just a moment and I'll find her telephone number for you.' Baksim smiled at me from across the room. Yes, his Nescafé prophecy had come true - the trip to Tuzla had been an amazing start to my research.

  In the twilight car ride home, it struck me. Both of my chance encounters, with Kemal's physical bath and with Tülay's book on the history of hamams, were encounters with hamams as historical, antiquated remains to be dug up and written about. I was in Istanbul to uncover the vibrancy of an ongoing bathing culture. What was I about to walk into? Were today's hamams an 'unhygienic business,' in Kemal's words, or would I find otherworldly atmospheres of steam and glistening marble, private palaces to the body? Had the ancient communal baths been replaced by modern spa culture servicing the individual? I hoped not.

  The very next evening, I called Marina from my new home in Ortaköy.

  'You're not going to believe where I'm staying. I'm in a four-story town house with portholes for windows!'

  'Excellent,' she said with breathy approval. 'Where?'

  'In a little town along the Bosphorus called Ortaköy. It's only about twenty minutes from Sultanahmet,' I said, referring to the center of Old Stamboul where the Romans created Constantinople and the Ottomans Istanbul.

  'Have you been to any hamams yet, the ones we talked about?'

  'Not the ones we talked about,' I said, so ecstatic about my windfall living situation that I'd momentarily forgotten about my more pressing mission. 'It took two days to get settled, and then on the suggestion of Kemal and Baksim, I went to a place called Galatasaray. They told me it was the safest bet, but it was kind of sordid,' I said, remembering the kese scrub performed with a mitt that smelled like Gorgonzola cheese.

  'Oh no, you didn't go to Galatasaray. That's the worst.'

  'Thank God. I was getting worried that the best hamams are in France.'

  'Go to Sultanahmet tomorrow, and try Caalolu and Çemberlita?. Both are very touristy, but will give you the flavor and scale of a real Ottoman hamam. So how did you end up in this apartment, I mean town house?'

  'Marina, you won't believe this. The first morning I was in Istanbul, I met a character named Kemal who has an extra city house, of all things, that he's rented to me for as long as I want to stay here.'

  'What do you mean, "as long as you want to stay there"?' Marina asked curiously.

  'I mean if I decide to stay another week. Then, through one of Baksim's uncles, I met an architect and historian who wrote a history of Turkish baths and we're going to have lunch tomorrow.'

  'This is all good, but you need to concentrate on living, breathing hamams, not people excavating or writing about baths. You need to visit at least two a day. Remember, there are sixty-seven registered hamams in Istanbul.'

  'Got any bank weekends coming up?' I asked.

  'In fact, I do,' she said, laughing. Marina had recently left her job in Moscow and taken a position at a London investment bank. Almost every weekend seemed to be surrounded by a bank holiday on Friday or Monday. Her suitcase was always in the hall; any time Marina had a three-day weekend she left the country. In fact, she traveled so often and to such exotic, borderline undesirable places that I sometimes wondered if she weren't a special agent or spy, not to mention that she liked to dance around in her underwear to the James Bond theme song. 'I could come over for a long weekend next week.'

  'Perfect. But Kemal said I'm not supposed to have any slumber parties.'

  'What?'

  'You've got to meet this guy. I can't tell if he's a complete charlatan or a misunderstood artist. In any case, he's my landlord and I kind of like him.'

  Earlier that morning and the day after we barged in on the tea party, Baksim and I toured the pink house alone. 'Wait, Kemal wants me to live in this whole house?' I asked, incredulous. On a cobblestone lane opposite the Ortaköy mosque, we had entered the chaotic mind of Kemal Orga. The basement kitchen was designed to look like the galley of a cruising yacht - a bilge pump toilet, plates moored to the walls using special vertical dish racks, and nautical instruments hanging from the rough cement walls. The next level was a small unlivable drawing room and dining room with an outoftune miniature piano, lumpy yellow furniture, and a grammar school writing desk strewn with antique fountain pens, inkblots, and letters in Turkish. It looked like an Agatha Christie crime scene. Painted across the wall in blue paint: 'the right feeling.' The third level resembled the ideal living quarters of a wealthy Oxbridge student circa 1910: French doors opened onto an enormous high-ceilinged, fustily furnished room with exposed brick and huge closets constructed out of tall bamboo reeds. This would suit me for the next ten years.

  'One more floor,' said Baksim. 'You still haven't seen the bedroom.'

  This final flight of stairs, the narrowest, led us through a homemade shoji screen and into a sunlit gabled room dominated by a king-size bed and two decks. One deck, like a widow's walk, peered down onto Ortaköy's main piazza, a row of restaurants looking across the Bosphorus to Beylerbeyi. The second deck, an outdoor living room with wicker furniture and potted azaleas, looked out onto Istanbul's famously surreal view. Ortaköy's flamboyantly Baroque mosque was pitted against the ultra-modern Europe-to-Asia suspension bridge.

  The steps creaked and a deep-throated voice yelled, 'Günaydin!' Kemal Orga emerged into his own attic bedroom.

  Kemal was sporting three days of silver whiskers, and his apparel was more disheveled than his unkempt look of the day before. He wore a fluffy blue parka that would three weeks later be eaten by his puppy. He was definitely in costume. He looked like an aristocratic Turkish gangsta or a German hiker in need of a bath.

  'Kemal, are you going for a hike in today's rain?' I teased, hoping to get to the bottom of the pose. I was starting to adore him.

  He threw back his head with an English chortle. 'I'm about to confront my tenants, and I need to cultivate a raffish look.'

  'Am I one of your tenants?'

  'No, no. You're safe for now,' he said, reaching out to touch my shoulder. 'My family owns a building on the waterfront that we're trying to turn into a boutique hotel. A few tenants refuse to go, and since I'm the point man for the hotel, I have to take care of this.'

  The point man? Baksim explained to me later that Kemal is the beloved black sheep of his affluent banking and real estate family. Kemal's older brother oversees a huge luxury housing project, but Kemal's interests revolve around antique boat restoration and painting. From time to time, the family put pressure on him to be the 'point man' on a project, but Kemal is cut from a fundamentally different cloth, and his forays into the business, according to Baksim, usually ended with another family member cleaning up after him.

  'So what do you think of my house?'
>
  'I'm speechless. It's a fantasy world.'

  He smiled, looking pleased that I'd appreciated his porthole windows. I asked Kemal if guests would be a problem.

  'Where would she sleep?' he asked.

  'Well, right here. I've never seen such a big bed.'

  'Like a slumber party? I don't want any slumber parties in my bed.'

  'How's the excavation going?' I asked, not understanding his objection to slumber parties. I thought most men dreamed of slumber parties in their beds, even if they weren't invited.

  'Yes, that's another reason I stopped by. I wanted to Xerox that book you were telling me about.'

  'Oh, the ancient bath book,' I said. I had referred to it during our walk but hadn't thought he was serious about wanting to see it and put it out of my mind. 'Let me get it for you. It's a long book; you might want to look specifically at the section on the heating systems.'

  'Thank you, and hopefully you can come back out to Tuzla this weekend,' Kemal said. 'We've cleared all the rubble and you can see the furnace now. Also, when you have time, I'd like to show you my other house in a planned community that my family developed. It's very beautiful and modern, and my living room is shaped like a hamam,' he said with a wink.

  Our cab slowly snaked the congested seven kilometers from Ortaköy to Sultanahmet. Crowded buses were hard to endure when a cab ride cost only $1.50. We were going to the City. Say Eis ten Polis — Greek for 'to the city' — ten times really fast and you get 'Istanbul,' at least according to my college Greek professor. The city of Constantine, the city of Süleyman the Magnificent, where hamams were once so popular that bathing revenues subsidized libraries and a yearly parade of hamam owners drew crowds on the streets of Istanbul.