“No city is complete without its own hammam” said Princess Scheherazade, one of the main characters of One Thousand and One Nights (Alf laila wa laila), the famous collection of tales which scholars have dated to the 10th century. The meaning of the word hammam (in Arabic) and hamam (in Turkish) is a place where you go to purify your body with water and steam. Archaeological remains have shown that hammams were very popular among the Islamic peoples as early as the caliphate of Umayyad, the dynasty which ruled over the Muslim empire from 661 to 750 A.D.. There are also many documents, especially legal manuals, which describe the properties of the baths in great detail and list those built. In the city of Damascus, for instance, there were 57 public baths in the 12th century, while in nearby Aleppo the number was as high as 195. In Baghdad, between the 9th and 10th centuries, records show thousands of hammams in existence, whereas in Cordoba, at the end of the 10th century, scholars believe there was anything between 300 and 600.
One book which gives a good idea of hammam architecture is Les bains antiques du Proche-Orient dans les archives de New Haven et Princeton and is based on the description of the public bathhouses in Jerash, Jordan. Originally, the buildings were basic, with just a couple of rooms and the occasional ornamental detail. Upon entering, you removed your clothes, wrapped a towel around you and entered a very humid room. It had a vaulted ceiling and a variety of wall and floor coverings, there were no windows to keep the steam and heat in, but natural light entered through glass in the dome ceiling. Over the centuries, hammam interiors underwent a transformation: more rooms were added and they were adorned with decoration, marble, fountains and natural light effects. Hammams enjoyed their finest hour with the Ottoman Empire. The hammam ritual typically begins in the apodyterium, the changing room, then you enter the tepidarium (the warm room) where the temperature is between 30 and 35 degrees. After becoming acclimatised, you move on to the calidarium (the hot room) for the actual steam bath. The temperature here is 40-45 degrees and the humidity between 95 and 100%. Natural soaps, clay and lotions can be used during and after the steam bath to purify the body. Some of the most famous public bathhouses are in Istanbul. The oldest baths are the Hamam di Çemberlitas, commissioned by Sultan Nûr Bânû and designed by Sinan in 1584. Then there is the fairy-tale Cağaloğlu Hamamı, situated in an 18th-century baroque building whose sheer beauty has made it a popular location with filmmakers, and Süleymaniye Hamami, built in 1557 and later restored. In Spain, on the other hand, the Hammam Al Ándalus in Cordoba, one of the largest of its kind in Europe, is well worth a visit, while in Morocco at the Mouassine in Marrakesh, the steam has a wonderful aroma of argan oil. Hammams are pure pleasure and emotion for the mind and body and this is eloquently described by the protagonist in the novel L’hammam by the Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun: «You visit the hammam, as if you could magically find the answers to your problems. Why not? It’s in the steam in these places… that we have a chance to get close to the truth».
