Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [125]
Even John Freely, the author of many delightful books on Turkey, said, “I’ve never taken a bath!”
But it was the tall, fair press attaché from the United States Consulate who seemed most disconcerted by my request. To a dive off İstiklâl Caddesi, or to the whirling dervishes tekke in Beyoğlu, he would take me in a snap. But not to the hamam. He, too, said he’d never taken one. “I’m a midwestern Scandinavian,” he explained, “and we’re very reserved.”
One Turkish woman at the university thought her mother would like it. “She would be nostalgic. And you would see what it was like when the Turks did not go to health clubs and do step aerobics.”
I turned to that observant eighteenth-century Englishwoman Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose friendships with Pope, Congreve, and Addison were already legend when she left for Turkey with her husband, Edward, who was ambassador extraordinary to the court of Turkey. In “The Turkish Embassy Letters,” her entries about the baths are famous. She arrived in her traveling habit, “which is a riding dress, and certainly appeared very extraordinary to them.” But not one of the women showed her anything but courtesy, “none of those disdainful smiles or satirical whispers that never fail in our assemblies when anybody appears that is not dressed exactly in fashion.” With the single exception of Lady Mary, they were, “in plain English, stark naked, without any beauty or defect concealed.” Then the lady sitting next to her asked her to join them. They tried to persuade her, they smiled, “and would fain have undressed me for the bath,” when finally, she opened her shirt and showed them her stays, and “they believed I was so locked up in that machine, that it was not in my own power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my husband.” Lady Mary knew that her entertaining letters to England described sights and customs no one had seen before “and what no book of travels could inform you,” she wrote Lady Rich, “as ’tis no less than death for a man to be found in one of these places.”
Emin Saatci, my guide to the baths, says that while it would no longer be death, it would mean the loss of the bath’s license, and women in that quarter of Istanbul might not return to it, even if the permit to reopen were granted. Which was also, at least in part, why we could not take photographs in the women’s baths. The women were naked. In the men’s baths we could, for although my photographer was a woman—my daughter Kate—accompanied by Emin, the men always wore the hamam towel around their hips.
We enter the beautiful, peaceful enclosed gardens of the Mihrimah Sultan Camii, designed by the great sixteenth-century architect Sinan for Süleyman the Magnificent’s daughter. We are at last permitted into the ancient hamam that adjoins it. Only the men’s side of the hamam is working, and Kate is allowed to photograph there. In addition to the hamam towel, the men wear caramel-colored plastic scuffs just like those we wear at the beaches on Long Island. I sit off to the side, taking notes, waiting for Kate and Emin to emerge. It’s the middle of June, it’s only noon, and although I’m sitting in the cooling-off or reception room, the first of the three, sweat drips off my forehead into my eyebrows. Several men, who have been standing and sitting wrapped in red-and-white-striped towels, are watchful and begin to gather around me; they gesture, bringing their fingers to their lips in a kiss of admiration. Slowly two of the younger men come closer. One, really a boy, is soon peering over my shoulder at my notebook. He smiles at me. I smile back.