The door to the Hamam closes behind me with an ominous, thundering boom. The sound slowly dissipates around the stone walls, it hangs in the thick air for a few minutes, slides gracefully through the circle of archways and alcoves and finally seeps its way into the cracks in the marble floor. This is my first visit to a Turkish bathhouse. I stand transfixed until the boom dies away completely and all that is left is sound of water trickling, flowing out of the marble basins in the alcoves that surround the central marble slab. The noise and chaos of Istanbul has melted away. I have stepped back in time. I am standing at the heart of Cemberlitas, Istanbul’s most famous Hamam (bathhouse), built in 1584 by Sinan, the Architect... and I don’t know what to do.
I am wearing only a pestemal, a sarong-like cloth, that closely resembles an oversize tea towel, and a pair of blue plastic flip flops. In my right hand I am holding a washing mitt and a small matchbox containing a tiny bar of soap. Clenched in my left fist are a few Turkish coins.
I take off the pestemal and lie naked on the marble slab, marvelling at how warm it is. My newly acquired American friends do the same, and eventually our whispers and embarrassed giggles give way to individual silences. Shafts of light spearing through the holes in the domed roof above me, forming soft searchlights. Motes of dust float in the beams of light and I am at once lost in the history of this marvellous building. I wonder about the women who, throughout its history, have come to rest here. I am close to falling asleep when the door booms closed again.
A turkish women wearing only a bikini bottom shuffles towards me. I sit up, awkwardly covering myself with the pestemal. She is middle-aged, large with a huge belly that overhangs the bikini bottom and full heavy breasts that hang almost to her waist. Her hair is brown and damp from the moist air. Her eyes are dark and as heavy as her breasts. She takes the soap and mitt from me, and I press the coins into her hand. “This is for you”. I say. “Teşekkür”, she responds. “Thank you.” I think I detect a tiny glimmer of light in her eyes. I had been told that if you tip the women, they will sing for you. She takes my money, my soap and mitt and leaves the room. I wait, sitting on the side of the slab, with my feet dangling like a preschooler.
When she returns, she spreads my pestemal out on the slab and indicates that I lie down on it, face down. She has brought a bowl of soapy water with her, and she proceeds to scrub my back and legs. Her hands have the strong confidence of a midwife washing a newborn baby. My back twinges in anticipation, as I recall an episode of the Lonely Planet Globe Trekker when Ian Wright attends a Turkish bathhouse and is tortuously folded into a pretzel. But my woman is gentle with me, and as she washes me, she starts to sing softly, and my mind retrieves long forgotten memories from my childhood.
She gives me small slap on my bottom, it is the universal signal to “turn over”. And she starts the process again. She pours bowl after bowl of warm water over me and then disappears once again, without a word. I am not sure if I am “done”. So I wait. She returns with fresh bowl of soapy water... and a square of muslin cloth. I open my eyes just in time to see a cloud of bubbles descend from above and land on my body. It is the most divine sensation, the caress of a million tiny bubbles. She massages my skin, and I watch, fascinated, as she prepares the next cloud. She dips the cloth into the water and then flicks it to form a billowing spinnaker, she gathers up the edges forming a balloon. Squeezing the cloth, a cloud of champagne bubbles floats towards me. “Make sure you pay extra for the bubbles, a friend had wisely told me”.
When she is done and I am all rinsed off. She sits me up and takes me by the hand to one of the alcoves on the edge of the room. The floor is treacherously wet and she walks slowly with me, still holding my hand, to ensure I don’t slip. She sits me down on the floor between her legs, next to an ancient marble basin. Warm water is flowing from a tap above, and is overflowing across the floor. She pours a jug of water over my head, and I splutter. She squeezes a dollop of cheap shampoo on my head and washes my hair. It is now that I remember, I was recommend to provide my own shampoo. I love having my hair washed, it is one of life’s simplest pleasures. I am totally in the moment as she massages my head and I squeeze my eyes tighly shut, to prevent the shampo from running in my eyes. She rinses me off with a few more spluttery ladles of water. Then, handing me the jug, she urges me to continue rinsing my own hair. The bath house has filled up with more women now, there are murmuring voices mingling with the flowing water, creating a song of the Hamam, an echoing melody. My woman returns, she takes me by the hand and leads me out of the bathhouse. She presents me with a dry pestemal to use as a towel and gives me a gift, a crude plastic comb. Hot pink with widely spaced teeth. And a couple of postcards of Cemberlitas. I thank her, and she thanks me again. There is a hint of a smile.
I stand in the corridor that is now the change room of Cemberlitas. It is not until I visit Cagaloglu Hamam a few days later, that I realise how brutally this Hamam has been robbed of its Camekan (entrance hall) when the adjacent Divanyolu Street was widened in 1868. The men’s section still remains intact, with its wooden balustrades and private rooms. Traditionally, I would have been taken to a small room, where there would be a bed I could rest on and relax after my “bath”. Here I am huddled among other women, dressing, undressing, drying, giggling. It is a thoroughfare, not a room. It has the feel of a locker room. Indeed, I retrieve my street clothes from one of the lockers that line one side of the corridor. I decide to skip the complementary hair dryer, and I slip out into the cool of Istanbul’s evening.
I float, rather than walk down the street. I have never felt so clean. But beyond the cleanness, I have a lightness of being, that only otherwise comes from being in love, or receiving that phone call that a job application has been successful. Euphoric. I glide. I am quite sure there are visible God rays emanating from my body.
There is a light on in the Turkish Rug Emporium. The charismatic Farouk welcomes me inside, he has a cigarette in one hand and a glass of tea in the other. I drink tea with him and his friends. “Your hair is wet.” he says. It is more of a question than a statement. We both know, he knows, the answer. “I have just come from the Hamam.” I reply. He smiles knowingly, “Then after your tea, you must go home to bed,” he says, “You will sleep well tonight.”
And he was right.
I awoke the next morning having slept the sleep of the Sultan’s wife, Queen Valide herself. But I awoke with the obsessive single-mindedness of an addict. Where was my next visit to a Hamam going to be?
This photo was taken not in Cemberlitas, but in the Bathhouse of Roxelana... sadly now, a Government owned rug shop.