The History of Baths

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Turkish Steam Baths

Turkish Steam Baths (Turkish: hamam from the Arabic: حمّام, or ḥammām, ḥammām with a general meaning of "heat". The word Hammām means "bathroom" or "toilet" in many dialects of vernacular Arabic.

Turkish baths originated in the Middle East and they involve exposure to warm air, then steam or a hot air immersion, followed by a massage, and finally immersion in or under cold water. The ritual of a Turkish bath, as the Roman baths before them involves movement chamber to the next, they can be categorised as the wet sauna. Separate washrooms and soaking pools are included in the bath building, as are dressing and rest rooms. Turkish baths are used for weight reduction, cleansing, and relaxation.

Historically they combined the East and the West; they used the massage and cosmetic aspects of East Indian bathing with Roman plumbing. Instead of a high windowed, light tepidarium, the Turkish bath had:

“cupolas sparsely pierced by the glow of coloured bullions, or . . . stalactite cupolas in the smaller rooms.”

This seventeenth century description conjures a world of half-light, quiescence, magic and seclusion. The sıcaklık contains a large marble stone where the customers can lie on to rest, or have a massage. The Turkish baths still in use at Constantinople now called Istanbul contain a series of domed rooms, the domes supported on pedantries and each series of rooms have warm, hot, steam areas, and separate massaging facilities.

Christian crusaders returned from war in the Middle East brought the concept of Turkish baths back to Western Europe. Because Europeans plumbing had not advanced to the level that it could supply the copious amounts of hot water needed for Turkish baths the idea did not catch a hold. The Turkish bath today still exists in many countries in both the Middle East and Europe, but it now tends to be an adjunct to home bathing, the advent of home plumbing have reduced their popularity and therefore importance.

A modern hamam whether in America Western Europe or the middle east combines the structural elements of its predecessors in Anatolia, the Roman thermae and Byzantine baths, with the functionality of the Central Asian tradition of steam bathing, ritual cleansing. Historically the Arabs were exposed to the Greek Roman bathing concept in war following their conquests of Alexandria. The Ottoman hamams started out as structural elements which were annexed to mosques, however they quickly evolved into bathing institutions in their own right, the finest example being the "Çemberlitaş Hamamı" built in Istanbul in 1584.

A typical hamam consists of three interconnected basic rooms similar to its Roman ancestors the sıcaklık or -caldarium the hot room, the warm room tepidarium the intermediate room and the soğukluk the cool room.

David Urquhart, a diplomat who had written The Pillars of Hercules, introduced Turkish baths to Victorian Britain. This travel book about his journey to Spain and Morocco in 1848 described the system of dry hot air baths. In 1856, Richard Barter, inspired by Urquhart's book, collaborated with him and they opened the first modern Turkish bath in the United Kingdom at St Ann's Hydropathic Establishment in Blarney, County Cork, Ireland. The idea spread across the water and the first Turkish bath to be built in England since Roman times opened in Manchester. In July 1860 Roger Evans, a member of one of Urquhart's Foreign Affairs Committee, opened a Turkish bath at 5 Bell Street, Marble Arch. Today only about twenty Turkish baths remain; open in the British Isles, although the concept of hot-air baths still survive in the form of Russian steam baths and the Finnish sauna.

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