Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [128]
The first time I had a bath, at Cağaloğlu Hamam, I was scrubbed with a kese (a loofah) so hard I couldn’t decide, at first, if it was enjoyable. And it took me a while to realize that the gray stuff on the kese was actually my skin. But I did feel great at the end, though my tan was gone, and I concluded it was indeed all worth it. Other visits to hamams outside of Istanbul didn’t have such scrub-happy attendants, but they made me feel great, too.
When I returned to Cağaloğlu years later, the attendants were almost all Russian and looked like they were going to pummel me. But they preferred much softer cloths, and they weren’t aggressive at all. I still felt enormous well-being when it was all over, but in retrospect I think I preferred the more startling experience of my very first hamam. (Cağaloğlu, by the way, is one of my favorite Turkish words and is pronounced JAH-low-loo.) This hamam has become so famous that its sign now states it is featured in the best-selling book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, by Patricia Schultz (Workman, 2003). I still think Cağaloğlu is worth going to—the architecture of the hamam is beautiful—but experiencing more than one hamam is ideal. Before setting out for a bath, check on the hours and days of the week—they aren’t always identical for men and women (occasionally only one or two days of the week or certain hours are set aside for women).
Yael Alkalay, founder of the wonderful Red Flower line of bath and body products (redflower.com), is one of the most inspiring and interesting people I’ve ever met—and I’m not simply saying that because I am a huge fan of her products, which are 100 percent botanical based and are found at hotels like the Mayflower Inn and Spa and the Carneros Inn. She traces her family’s history back to the late fifteenth century in Turkey, where nearly all the men in the family were grand rabbis (read a fascinating story about the Turkish coins she counts as her most prized possessions in The New York Times, February 20, 2005). Alkalay didn’t visit Istanbul until she was a teenager, but many of the smells and scents there were familiar due to her grandmother’s cooking. She says that Red Flower is really an expression of the smells of her childhood, and she holds the sights, sounds, and scents of places in her mind to keep them alive. “The first two things I do when I’m in Istanbul,” she told me, “are to take one of the ferries across the Bosphorus, drinking tea of course, and go to a hamam. Cağloğluis my favorite.” Alkalay has been to more than five hundred bathhouses around the world, and notes that “every product in the Red Flower hamam treatment is inspired by this ritual.” In fact it was the hamam line that first made me a fan, and Red Flower’s travel hamam set—mint tea silt purifier, clay, lemon coffee blossom olive stone scrub, steam room mist, cardamom amber oil, and tangerine fig lotion all tucked into a 4½-inch leather pouch—is a must-have. Alkalay adds that she believes travel is “seeing a few things very well. You can sit in front of the Blue Mosque, sipping tea, and just look at it from sunup to sundown. You’ll never forget it.”
RECOMMENDED READING
The Art of the Kariye Camii, by Robert Ousterhout (Scala, 2002). This is a wonderful book to look at before you visit the Chora Church. The photographs are beautiful—they will prepare you for the real thing, though they are not nearly as beautiful—and the author makes a strong case for renewed preservation of this Byzantine