Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [124]
The park is a fine place to relax and there are plenty of benches for the purpose. The stalls along the verges of the park do a brisk business in the sale of exotic birds and the immediate area is something of a pet emporium. Quarantine restrictions being what they are, I decided not to buy a bird. I did, however, invest in a tin of bird seed for five cents, on sale from an old woman who trafficks in such things, and I spent a pleasant quarter hour feeding the flocks of pigeons.
These four imperial mosques span the early sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries and represent the best in Ottoman building. Furthermore, they have the advantage of lying relatively close to one another and can be reasonably worked into a single day’s tour. But if you want to spread your visit to the imperial mosques out over several days, the Beyazit and Suleiman Mosques can be seen in one tour and any visit to Topkapi Palace and Hagia Sophia can be easily extended to take in the Blue Mosque. The Yeni Valide Mosque is nearly impossible to avoid since it stands only a stone’s throw from the central bus station and from the ferry slips where boats depart for the Princes’ Islands, the Asian suburbs, and the villages along the Bosporus.
Bathed in Tradition
NANCY MILFORD
THERE’S NO reason that the word “monument” has to designate a museum or a mosque or a statue. A Turkish hamam is indeed one of the true monuments of Istanbul, and in this piece we learn about the author’s attempt to visit a few that the Turks themselves frequent.
NANCY MILFORD is the author of Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Random House, 2001) and Zelda: A Biography (Harper & Row, 1970), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and has been published in twelve languages.
IT WAS the end of the summer in 1983, and I was sitting with friends in a taverna on the harbor at Hydra, a Greek island that remains a haven for writers and painters. The waterfront, bright with gaily colored lights, looked like the setting for an operetta. So it was hardly surprising when the Egyptian cotton broker at our table turned his sly eyes on me and sang, “You must go to Istanbul and take the honey baths!” True, we were talking about travel, and we had been drinking that cold gasoline the Greeks call retsina. But I knew immediately that I wanted to go.
Years later, when I was teaching at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University in Bebek on a Fulbright fellowship, I had my chance.
In the old British guidebook Handbook for Travelers in Constantinople, published in 1893 by John Murray, Lord Byron’s publisher, there is a chapter entitled “Baths—Cemeteries—Kaiks—Dogs,” which states that there are 130 of these baths—hamams, as they are called in Turkish—scattered throughout the city. Now, the only baths a foreign tourist is likely to enter are the historic hamams near the Hagia Sophia in the Sultanahmet district, the elegant, marble Cağaloğlu and the Çemberlitaş, and the Galatasaray in the Beyoğlu district across the Golden Horn. But I wanted to go to the baths the Turks themselves still used.
For the baths are public, and the revenues from their fees were once used to support pious institutions in the complex of buildings that surround the great mosques—libraries, schools, and hospitals. Although the hamams were built on the model of Roman baths, with three rooms, the notion of running water, of personal cleanliness, is integral to the Islamic faith.
None of the Turkish women I knew at the university would go to a hamam with me. Even Mini Garwood, who had gone hang-gliding high above the Mediterranean