Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [126]
In the busy neighborhood of Zeyrek, just shy of the aqueduct of Valens and near the ruined Church of the Pantocrator, is the old and lovely and somewhat shabby Cinili Hamam, the Tiled Bath. The hamam is a double bath, with separate entrances for men and for women, an early work of Sinan, who built it around 1547 for Süleyman’s admiral, Barbarossa. It faces the pretty outdoor markets thronged with people buying from shops selling honey in its comb or in huge glass jars, and fresh vegetables from the kitchen gardens just outside the great Theodosian land walls, or from the little red horse-drawn wagons loaded with garlic or with melons. Along the dusty street in large black plastic bags are the curled and bloody horns of the heads of slaughtered sheep. “Masaj?” a small woman in a flowered cotton housedress calls to me. She is standing at the women’s entrance to the hamam, welcoming and persistent. Then she takes me by the hand, for I am clearly uncertain, and, patting my hand reassuringly, she pulls me down the curving flight of narrow stone stairs into the dark outer room of the Cinili Hamam.
The owner, whose father, “Baba,” had owned this hamam before her, is dressed completely in black. She tells me that the tiles were removed to be cleaned and were perhaps stolen, since they have not been returned. Then she shrugs, makes a little pout, lights a cigarette, and turns me over to Fatma, the woman who had first brought me in. I undress in a small stall, wrapping a thin towel around me, and follow her awkwardly through a passageway to a large wooden door with handsome brass hinges, which opens into the hararet. This is the large marble chamber, warmed from the stoves below the baths, with the distinctive small bull’s-eye glass in the domed ceiling. It’s the hot room, where the very center is dominated by the raised gobektasi, or bellystone, upon which one stretches and is washed and massaged. I want the whole experience. And I am about to get it.
I am kneeling rather primly by a small marble basin, and the woman who has brought me in has undressed except for very small black lace bikini underpants. I’ve taken her hand and followed her as if I were a child going through a maze; she smiles at me and says something in Turkish. I don’t understand her, and she tries again; she gestures and turns on the brass faucets of running hot and cold water, which fills the basin and overflows onto the floor. She tells me something more insistently. I still don’t get it. She smiles and insists. I remain puzzled and bend toward her, when she suddenly dumps a pitcher of water over me. It’s shocking and exhilarating. I laugh and she laughs and we begin to splash.
Then she scrubs me with a rough linen mitt, rinses me, washes my ears, between my toes. She holds my head against her ample breasts, which fall to her waist, her nipples the color of tobacco, while she soaps me down again, and slings a cotton pillowcase fluffy with suds across my back. She pummels me into a state of bliss as I lie on the warm marble bellystone. Shafts of bright light stream into the dark interior of the hamam and I feel as if I were swimming in steam and heat and light.
Afterward, while I rest there, I watch a family that is in the hararet with me. There are three generations of women bathing and talking together. I had been told that in the old days mothers used to come to the hamam to look over their sons’ future wives, “to see if she had any peculiarities,” the owner of the shop Otto-mania said, “other than desiring their sons!” A fat grandmother lies somewhat separately from her family, sprawled across the marble floor, her bottom half wrapped in a hamam towel, her breasts and back bare; her dark hair