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Courtesy of Pascal Meunier from his Hammams
There is, of
course, nothing specifically Turkish about the so-called
'Turkish bath', any more than there is a unique type of English
bath or American bath. For this reason such baths are more
accurately thought of as Islamic hammams.
For
it was (mainly) European
18th and 19th century travellers who—when they first came across public
hot-air baths in the Ottoman Empire—labelled them Turkish, despite their
widespread existence in the maghreb and wherever else there was, or had
been, a Moorish or Islamic influence.
But the Islamic hammam
was by no means the first hot-air bath. The basic hot-air bath had been
in use in Sparta (and probably even earlier), reaching its zenith in
Rome after the development of the hypocaust.
The dry hot-air bath,
which was such an important part of the Roman thermae, survived
only in the Eastern Roman Empire (the Christians in the west seeming to
feel that if cleanliness was next to godliness, it was just as
well to keep it a long way behind).
Under Islam, however, cleanliness
'is a religious duty to be performed daily by the believer in his
ablution for the five daily prayers'.*
So hammams were
actively promoted. They were often beautifully designed, and the cold
plunge and swimming pools of the Roman thermae were replaced by
fountains and smaller decorative pools, since
naked bathing was firmly
rejected by Islam. Massage,
however, survived in a more developed form incorporating the shampooing
process.
< Photo: Oğurlu
But whereas the Roman pools were
separate from the hot rooms, in the hammam washing facilities
were introduced into the hot rooms.
Inevitably, the
combination of hot air and cold water turned the original dry heat of
the Roman baths into the misty, steamy atmosphere of the hammam,
still to be found in Turkey today or, closer to hand in, for example,
the north African owned hammams behind the Gare du Nord in Paris.
And
the hot air in such
establishments is not only humid, but often actually steamy, while the
floors are frequently covered in water, as one would expect from the
altered funtion of the hot rooms. |
