by Alexia Brue
The cab dropped us off near the unimaginably large dome of the Aya Sophia, the minarets an afterthought to what was originally a Byzantine church. Marina and I scurried past rug dealers who roved the streets near the Divan Yolu, shouting, 'Nice shoes!' or 'Let me help you . . . spend your money' to us. Slightly lost, we asked a rug rogue, 'Do you know where Çemberlita? is?'
'Yes, very close, but first come to my uncle's rug store for tea.' For once Marina was not interested in rugs; besides, she had her own personal dealers who e-mailed her when collectable suzanis became available.
Within a ten-minute walk of the Aya Sophia, the Blue Mosque, Topkapi Palace, the vast dripping Hades of the Roman Cistern, the former site of the Baths of Zeuxippus (a second-century Roman bath), and the Roman Hippodrome (site of chariot races) - yes, just ten minutes from all these Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman riches —are the last two great remaining monuments to the Ottoman hamam, Çemberlita? and Caalolu. Pronounced Chem-ber-lee-tash and Ja-la-lou. These are the hamams where foreign tourists end up after a day of sight-seeing in Old Stamboul and before the evening cruise along the Bosphorus with belly-dancing entertainers. There's something touristy and kitsch about these grand duchesses, yet if you want to see an imperial, still-functioning hamam, there's nowhere else to go in Istanbul.
Marina's pink scarf trailed in the warm breeze of this April day, her long brown braid wagging back and forth between her shoulder blades. She wore white netted heels with apparent indifference to the swirl of garbage on the street and stopped momentarily to consult a map. Marina had always been the map reader and I the second-guesser. While she traced her finger along the Divan Yolu, I thought about how this was our eighth year of visiting baths together. In college, Marina and I had a standing Friday night date: twenty minutes on the StairMaster, followed by thirty minutes in the college's sauna, disfigured by graffiti carved on every beam of wood. Our favorite graffito: 'Beware of Greeks bearing Trojans.'
We headed up the Divan Yolu, past Marina's beloved baklavateria, past an English-language bookstore where the Turkish owner wrapped his inventory in Saran Wrap and suggested Irfan Orga's Portrait of a Turkish Family to every customer who walked through the door. A quick right on Vezirhan Caddesi, and there at number 8 is Çemberlita? Hamam.
There was only a neon sign out front to tell us we'd arrived. Çemberlita?'s facade was not grand like a mosque's with a series of cascading domes and a parade of minarets. Hamams are always described as 'introverted buildings.' Gazing upon a hamam did not need to inspire awe in Allah; rather, hamams were places to satisfy Allah's will by performing ritual ablutions. Hamam architecture always contained the same succession of rooms; the architectural challenge lay in adapting the traditional layout of progressively hotter rooms to fit the constraints of a particular lot. As a rule, though, the men's and women's sections were built parallel to each other so the hot rooms could share a heating system.
A lean man in his late thirties with black hair and a slight hunch worked at the cashier's office. The listed prices, for a tourist hamam, were reasonable. Roughly $8 for a bath, $15 if you added the kese and massage. Certainly it was excellent value compared to some of the fleecers and baksheeshers employed at Galatasaray and Cagaloglu. But compared to a neighborhood hamam, where you could have the works for $6, it was steep.
'Ìngilizce biliyor musunuz?' I asked in halting Turkish. This phrase ('Do you speak English?'), as far as I was concerned, was the first to master in any language. It scored instant cultural diplomacy points, spared me of being confused with an assumptive American, and indicated subtly that I did not speak a word of Turkish.
He smiled. 'Yes, I speak English, of course I have to. It's not Turks who come here after all,' he said as if it were a self-evident fact.
'What do you mean, the Turks don't come here?' I asked. Had Kemal's precis been correct?
Marina nudged me as if to say 'Spare us the theatrics, let's have a bath.' But I needed to get to the bottom of whether or not Turks still visited hamams. I was pouting and I knew it, but the cashier obviously wanted to talk.
'I love the hamam,' he began. 'In fact, I love the hamam so much, my wife left me because she said, "You love hamam more than me," and she was right.' Hmm, this struck me as unlikely. I had heard about the law being a jealous mistress, but the hamam? He continued, 'The hamam is regarded by many in Istanbul as an old-fashioned ritual. Turks are proud of modernization, of all that Atatürk's accomplished.' He stopped and pointed to a wall hanging depicting a handsome square-faced man in a Western suit. The ubiquitous image of Kemal Atatürk's, the closest thing this secular state has to a savior. After our moment of silence, the cashier continued, 'Atatürk's modernized Turkey. No more veils, no more fez, everyone got a last name for the first time, Roman letters replaced Arabic letters, and we got plumbing. Turks are proud to be modern, and then, sadly, hamams became a reminder of life before modernization, before stability, before Atatürk's. Now people think, Why do I need to go to a hamam if I have a nice bathtub or shower at home? They forget the history, all the significance of bathing together.'
'Do Turks ever come here?' I asked.
'Occasionally, yes. Especially if they have a foreign friend visiting.'
I shot a glance at Marina. She wasn't taking this as hard as I was. What came out of her mouth next shocked me. 'Excuse me, is that rug from the Caucasus?' she asked, pointing to a rug in the reception area. How could she be thinking about rugs when a hamam employee had just confirmed that the Turks no longer visit hamams?
'Yes, it's a nineteenth-century piece from the Caucasus. It's my most valuable piece. You have a good eye.'
'Does someone own this hamam, or is it property of the state?' I asked, steering the conversation back to what I was interested in and curious to learn if Çemberlita? was part of a historic trust. It must be.
'I own the hamam,' he said, pushing back his shoulders. 'My family purchased Çemberlita? twenty-three years ago. My name is Rusen.' And he stuck out his hand in greeting. I've never known serendipity greater than Turkish encounters — owners and experts were always present instead of hidden behind screens of gatekeepers and bureaucracy. Right in front of us, the owner of a piece of Ottoman history. How strange to think that an individual could own a national treasure in Turkey. It struck me as the equivalent of a regular Joe owning Monticello or the Eiffel Tower.
'We want to open a hamam in America,' I told Rusen. After a week in Istanbul, I was becoming as extroverted as the Turks. Withhold nothing, that was my new philosophy.
'An excellent idea. So many of my customers are curious Americans. Maybe we should go into business together,' he said, thinking out loud. 'Definitely you should come with me to visit my other hamam in Bodrum, where I use thermal waters.' Another joy of Turkish people, in addition to their extroversion, was their ability to think out loud — not imagining, as we Americans often do, that daydreaming leads to a commitment. Baksim had already promised to provide 5 per cent of the capital for our New York hamam, but I took his intention as a show of support instead of a number with five zeros attached.
I looked through the doorway into the large open-plan two-storied reception area, with a balustrade belting the private rooms and hallway on the second floor. A dark, bony man emerged from a changing compartment on the second floor, dressed only in a pestamal, a piece of plaid fabric worn like a wraparound skirt on men or like a beach towel on women.
'That's called the camekân, or reception area,' explained Rusen. 'Men change upstairs and women have a separate locker room. After your bath, I invite you to come back here for tea and orange juice. You will be my guest.'
I peered into the camekân; mostly I saw corpulent Turkish women in baggy cotton dresses, smoking cigarettes.
'Those are some of the masseuses on break,' Rusen explained.
Marina asked, 'This is one of Istanbul's older hamams, isn't it?'
'Yes, it's one of ten still-functioning historic hamams. It was commissioned by the powerful mothe
r of Murat the Third. Her name was Nur-u Banu Sultan, and she hired Mimar Sinan to design it. You know Mimar Sinan?'
'The name sounds familiar,' I lied.
'Mimar Sinan is Turkey's most famous architect. He died at ninety-seven and not by natural causes. He was the Ottoman Empire's architect under Süleyman the Magnificent; that is how you call him. In Turkey we call him Süleyman the Lawgiver. Sinan designed, or oversaw, the construction of over twelve hundred buildings, including thirty-two hamams.'
'So when was this built?' I asked, not familiar with the time of Murat Ill's reign.
'In 1584, near the end of Sinan's life.'
'This hamam is over four hundred years old,' I said, incredulous. Eighteen generations of Turks and two generations of foreigners had passed through these halls in search of water, gossip, rejuvenation, an afternoon without their veil, ritual ablution, a wife for their son, steam, heat, and, most recently, a living history museum.
'Yes, this hamam has seen a lot of sultans. You know, the sultan would make sure that his advisers stayed very close to the hamam owners. Why?' Rusen was getting Socratic on us. 'Because revolutionaries conspired at the hamam. They would stand next to the kurnas, turn the water on full throttle, and plot a takeover of Topkapi Palace and the Seraglio Point; at least that was the legend. Hamam owners received kickbacks to watch the comings and goings of suspicious characters.' Nowadays, the Turkish men milling about in the Çemberlita? camekân still look suspicious, but more likely than not they're discussing a new Turkcell phone plan or a hot new nightclub in Tiinel rather than plotting Ankara's takeover.
We thanked Rusen for the history lesson. So what if the only Turks in the room would be the masseuses; at least we could use this as a jumping-off point to plan our hamam. It would inspire us architecturally, and maybe we'd found ourselves an experienced business partner.
Rusen had modernized the women's changing area so it resembled a gym locker room, and Marina and I wrinkled our noses at each other, hoping this would be the only modernized area. Wearing our pestamals, which looked like tablecloths we'd pinched from a Fourth of July picnic - blue-and-yellow checks for me, red and-black for Marina — and clomping along in nahn, wooden hamam flip-flops (think Turkish Dr. Scholl's), we felt like the miscast leads of a Turkish / Love Lucy. The shoes were two sizes too small, so we walked with the deliberation of dressage horses. Had it not been for Kemal's comment 'a very unhygienic business,' I would have ditched the nahn altogether.
First we walked through the soukluk, a warm passageway that once served as the delicate appetizer to the hotter stcakhk. Nowadays customers bolt straight to the stcakhk, forgoing the more modest heat of the soukluk, altogether. But the soukluk, is an important place to remember if you're looking for the more banal outlets of a hamam - like the toilet — as it's invariably in this tepid hallway. Though I hasten to add that visiting the lavatory in a hamam can instantly kill the romance of a dreamy drift back in time.
We opened the warped wood door of the stcakhk and a gust of humid air rolled over us. It felt as if we'd walked into a tropical cumulous cloud hanging over Barbados. The barometric pressure was so high that my contact lenses balked for a moment and then gratefully accepted the humidity. The mist cleared from my eyes. I suddenly remembered a line from the travel journal of Julia Pardoe, who visited a hamam in the 1830s: 'For the first few moments, I was bewildered; the heavy, dense, sulphureous vapour that filled the place, almost suffocated me.' Miss Pardoe had wondered whether the scene in the hamam was a creation of her 'distempered brain,' and I sympathized with the overwhelmed Englishwoman.
I clutched Marina's arm and we stood side by side, taking in the dimensions of this vast marble cavern topped with a Pantheon-size dome. It was enormous. Monumental and palatial. Big enough to accommodate the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and certainly a good climate for them.
The domes upon domes and tons of marble created the most astonishing acoustics. Again, I thought of Miss Pardoe, who was deafened by 'the wild, shrill cries of the slaves peeling through the reverberating domes of the bathing-halls, enough to awaken the very marble with which they were lined.' The halls still echoed with shouting, whistling, splashing, and laughing. Anyone sense-experiencing this room for the first time would be dazzled and overwhelmed; all five senses experiencing it in tandem were vying for attention amid sensory chaos.
Fanning off from the central octagonal room were small individual washing areas, 'halvets,' said Marina, 'and the basins are called kurnas. One hundred years ago they would have had elaborate silver or brass faucets, but everything was stolen, now just basic spigots remain.'
We had arrived at 7:00 P.M., prime time, and Çemberlita? was crowded with thirty or so women like ourselves, foreigners in Istanbul trying to resurrect an Ottoman lifestyle that sighed its last gasps a good eighty years ago. The göbektasi, a.k.a. the bellystone, was a massive octagonal crater of interlocking marble slabs, five times the size of the quaint little bellystones we had seen in Paris. The göbektasiis always in the center of the stcakhk and lies directly over the hamam's heater so that it's the warmest spot, the place for tight, stressed shoulders to melt into the marble in preparation for a hamam scrubbing.
'Marina, look at that göbektasi!'
'How many tons of marble do you think are in the room?' said Marina, similarly awestruck, though this was her second visit to Çemberlita?. 'They must have emptied Carrara for this.'
'This must be Turkish marble,' I said, remembering that marmara was the generic Greek word for marble because so much of it came from quarries by the Marmara Sea.
Lying on the slabs of marble were ten women being worked on by ten hamam ladies, who undeniably looked rather similar. Baksim had told me there was an expression 'fat as a hamam lady.' At the time I thought he was being unkind, but he'd covered only the half of it. The hamam ladies all wore black bikini bottoms, actually
We probably had at least a half-hour wait before jumping on the bellystone, but that was the perfect amount of preparation time. Other newcomers, without a Marina of their own, looked lost, confused, and overwhelmed. Arriving in the stcakhk for the first time is slightly akin to showing up for your first therapy session. You enter a strange room and are told, 'This is your time.' And there's a paralyzing trepidation as you think, This is my time? What do you mean, it's my time? Ask me some questions, give me some tasks to perform, and I'll interpret, but don't make me invent. Time in a hamam is similarly unstructured. But hamam therapy has two big advantages over psychotherapy. First, there is no therapist to entertain with witticisms from your, hopefully, hilariously neurotic life. And second, being physically nude speeds you to a state of emotional nudity, a stripping away of pretense and Prada. underwear (why stand on ceremony?), and flip-flops. Nothing else bound their flesh. Their figures had long ceased to be girlish, and their breasts tumbled toward the floor. They possessed the build, uniform, and strength of sumo wrestlers. That might be my body in thirty years, I thought with a strange sense of calm.
Marina and I found a kurna of our own in an unoccupied halvet. The words kurna, gobektasi, and halvet were starting to roll off my tongue, I felt so much a part of their Ottoman world. The kurnas deep marble basin overflowed with warm water, creating a continuous stream across the marble floor and into a gutter that circled the room. One could play a sophisticated game of bobbing for apples. Peering into the kurna, I noticed a faint green hue to the water created by the cast of the marble and the depth of the water. The gushing water created a feeling of largesse that in the old days, when water was something that came out of a well, bucket by bucket, must have felt like the ultimate luxury. I liked to imagine that Justinian built his cistern to feed the baths. We found a stack of turquoise-and-pink plastic hamam bowls, hamam tasis, that a hundred years ago would have been carved, perhaps even jewel encrusted, in expensive materials like silver, gold, or bronze.
Marina and I cleaned the floor and the bowls with a little soap. We doused ourselves in warm water to promote swe
ating and soaped the city grime off our faces and feet. Then we sat down next to the running water of the kurna. I looked at Marina and noticed that we had both lost weight since our pizza and sundae years at school in Iowa. The years after college were the lean years in every sense. Lean paychecks in large, expensive cities when dinner for one meant steamed broccoli and soy sauce. I filled another bowl with water and poured it over my head. Glancing around the room, underneath the dome, and in between the Corinthian columns, I saw every body type, every nationality, every pubic hair style on display. If people checked one another out, it was with a spirit of sisterhood. Comparison, perhaps, but not competition. Everyone in the room was more or less comfortable in her own skin, because the hamams draw adventurous, intrepid travelers without an assortment of body issues. No, the prudes were reading aloud from guidebooks down the street in the Blue Mosque, another of Sinan's tremendous creations.
The Blue Mosque's wealth of Iznik tiles — mostly blue, surprise, surprise - the elegant Arabic scrawl of verse from the Koran, the awesome expanse of the dome, and the daringly low candelabras inspired wonder and a shrinking sensation. Here in the hamam, each bather was an integral part of the tableaux. All the surroundings could be touched, used, and enjoyed. The göbektasiwas an altar at which I could comfortably be a supplicant.
One of the ladies came to collect first Marina and then me. Once you are under the hamam lady's power, you no longer have to move your own body. You are a car in neutral about to enter the most thorough, unrelenting car wash of your life. The hamam lady removed my ill-fitting nahn, positioned me on the bellystone, and doused me with warm water. We nodded hello to each other, and she introduced herself as Nermin. I looked up to the huge dome, dotted with a constellation of skylights called faunuses. The coming twilight lit the room in competing lasers of bluish light, cutting through the stcakhk's steamy mist at jagged angles. A planetary light show for one. The hamam lady returned, her wooden clogs clanking noisily over the marble floor. In front of her pendulous breasts, she carried a round pink bucket with a washcloth and a coarse-looking mitt.