In Sickness and in Health

Based on the evidence of narrative sources on the disasters that struck Istanbul, building inscriptions and archival records, this chapter describes the kinds of symptoms that show how the Çemberlitaş Hamamı aged over time. It defines the various causes of damage, such as fires, earthquakes, hailstorms, and daily wear and tear. Finally, the chapter analyses the repair and renovation work done to its structure in greater detail.

From Birth to Breadwinner

This chapter describes the hamam’s original appearance and how it began to take up work, having been readied for business with a supply of water and wood for fuel. The hamam’s employees (hamam managers, bathhouse attendants, servants, furnace stokers, and many others) and their organization in guilds make up one group of people connected to the monument, which can be identified based on archival and visual sources with relative certainty. More difficult to identify are the bathers; however, an analysis of the hamam’s neighbourhood’s make-up allows some answers. This chapter also provides a more detailed view of the hamam’s economic relation to the endowment, by looking at its income from entrance fees and at how much exactly it contributed to the endowment’s total income.

Family

This chapter describes the endowment that Nurbanu Sultan established, including a Friday mosque with many dependencies (schools, hospital, soup kitchen, inn) on the hills of Üsküdar. Furthermore, it analyses the economic relations between the charitable and the revenue-generating buildings and properties. Among these revenue-generating buildings counted the Çemberlitaş Hamamı, together with the Atik Valide Hamamı and the Büyük Hamam and the Havuzlu Hamam. Like a large, immobile grandee who lived a pious life in his mansion, distributing charity in the form of food, money and medicine to his kapı halkı, his retinue of dependents living in the neighbourhood, the mosque complex was not able to conduct the business necessary to sponsor that charity. Rather, it sent out its four sons (the four hamams) and relatives of its sons’ generation (residences, shops, workshops, mansions, farms and pastures) to do business on its behalf and to generate the large sums of money it needed to sustain itself and its philanthropic activities.

Ancestry

This chapter begins with the biography of the Çemberlitaş Hamamı’s patron, the queen-mother Nurbanu Sultan, and her motivations to construct the bathhouse. The second section turns towards the monument’s world-renowned architect, Mimar Sinan, presenting a brief biography as well as his involvement with the hamam’s construction. Much like humans have mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, so does the Çemberlitaş Hamamı have a distinguished lineage ranging from Greek baths to Roman thermae, Byzantine baths, early Arab-Islamic, Perso-Islamic, Seljuk and finally earlier Ottoman hamams. The final section traces this complex lineage with the help of a genealogical tree (silsilename) in order to elucidate the origins and development of various features in Ottoman bathhouse architecture.

Epilogue

The epilogue considers the Çemberlitaş Hamamı in the context of Istanbul’s cultural heritage and tourism policies of the first two decades of the 2000s. It touches upon the impact of the international spa and wellness boom on the concept of the hamam, both in Turkey and abroad. Furthermore, it briefly addresses the recent restoration of other hamams of the Turkish capital, before concluding with a historiographic remark on notions of Ottoman identity.

Impressions and Identity

This chapter describes the hamam’s different identities and the impressions it left on its users: its religious function of ritual cleansing, based on the Qur’an and the Hadith (the collected sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad); its social function as a place to gather and exchange news, and as a place for important rituals such as the bride’s bath; its place in sexual fantasies as well as sexual encounters; its medical function in the treatment of certain diseases, as laid out in Ottoman medical treatises; and its urban function to convey a sense of architectural splendour and to promote the imperial dynasty by demonstrating its concern for the city inhabitants’ well-being;.

Old Age

This chapter describes how the hamam began to show signs of aging. This included a redefinition of its economic family relations, as it became a burden to the endowment and was rented out according to a practice that approximated the status of renters to that of owners. Furthermore, old age now meant that after a disastrous fire in 1865 novel city planning practices assigned less value to the sixteenth-century structure and allowed the monument to be mutilated for the sake of building a European-style boulevard wide enough for tramway traffic. At the same time, the hamam took on a new identity as an emblem of Ottoman cultural heritage to be displayed at nineteenth-century world fairs and exhibitions which required each nation to represent itself by easily recognizable architectural icons. With the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, this split identity continued: on the one hand, hamams constituted an old, redundant institution standing for the Ottoman Empire and lifestyle, resulting in neglect and destruction; on the other hand, they were part of the cultural heritage that every nation-state needs to legitimise itself. Nevertheless, the Çemberlitaş Hamamı managed to survive for practical reasons, as it still provided hygiene and entertainment.

Second Spring

The last chapter analyses four more identities that the Çemberlitaş Hamamı has taken on in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: that of a tourist attraction promoted by a long lineage of Orientalist painters, travel writers and, lately, guidebooks; that of an emblem for an Ottoman past that many Turkish citizens now rediscover in the wake of a postmodern nostalgia for an Ottoman past that is imagined to be both simpler and more authentic—also known as Ottomania; that of a modern workplace; and that of a digital entity with an online presence.

Introduction

Do monuments have lives that justify writing their biographies? And if they do, are their lives punctuated by events and structured by relationships, similar to human lives? Do they have an identity of their own, and does this identity change over time? In addition to introducing the Çemberlitaş Hamamı briefly and providing a literature review of the topic of hamams, the introduction takes up these questions and examines the notions of individuality and biography within the Islamic and Ottoman context. Furthermore, it justifies applying the format of a biographical narrative to the history of the hamam.