OTP’s Guide to the Turkish Baths (What’d You Say About My Hamam!?)

Daily Blend, Europe, Health & Fitness, Lifestyles, Culture & Inspiration | Ross Kenyon | December 12, 2010 at 5:02 pm

Your life is incomplete without a good scrub-down from a hairy towel-laden Turk. As iconic as kebabs and fez hats, Turkey is the capital of aggressive exfoliation, the center for mean clean and if a traditional Turkish bath (known as a hamam) isn’t on your itinerary, you’re doing it all wrong. Here is the step-by-step bath breakdown so you know what to expect.

Watch What You Say About My Hamam

In Turkish, cockroach literally translates to “hamam insect,” so choose your words wisely. As it takes some courage to go, you’ll want to go to the best hamam around. The well-informed will ask you if you went to that hamam and at OTP, we want you to answer with a solid “Yes!”

“Çemberlitaş Hamamı”

The baths range from grimy to extravagant. The most famous bath of all (that hamam) is “Çemberlitaş Hamamı” in Istanbul and was built way back in 1584. It would be nice if this experience was cheap but you will have to splurge a bit for your bathhouse memories. Use of the facilities and a professional cleaning is 55 Turkish Lira (about $36), but with a group (couchsurfing rub-down meet-up?) it’s possible to get it down to 40 Lira ($27).

The Proper Procedure

The hamam has two identical chambers separated by sex. You walk in, go to the desk and buy your package. Once split into male/female groups, you’ll be led upstairs to private rooms to change. Most people go nude, covered by a towel.

OTP Tip:Uncrossing your legs like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct is a sure fire way to flash your fellow bath-goers. Inversely, avoid lap-eye contact to steer clear of people’s unsightlies.

When ready, you’ll take your massage token and individually-wrapped scrubber you received from the desk through the doors, past the shampoo stations and into a large steamy chamber. There is a waist-high polygonal platform in the center of the room. If your Turkish is limited, you will wander in sheepishly, wonder which Turkish man is going to end up cleaning your disrobed self, and then lay or sit on the inside of the platform and enjoy the steam and hot surface until summoned.

Eventually an interlocutor will approach you with varying capacity for English and ask you to come to the edge and lay on your back. You’ll trade your massage token for the pleasure of a unique and strange tale.

Preparation for Emasculation

The process starts with an exfoliating scrub. The attendant puts on a rough cloth mitt and begins vigorous trawling your skin from your legs up to your face, neglecting your nether regions. The man performing this service may or may not keep looking at his mitt and showing it to you, communicating in the universal language the mocking disappointment of clearly how little you receive exfoliating rubs. Bite past your shame, it’s time for the massage.

This Is It

Not some sort of relaxing spa treatment; these burly gents will kick your ass. There may be some schadenfreudes in the ranks of bath attendants but this is probably just a stylistic flourish to convince both the giver and receiver that even if this whole endeavor seems homoerotic, it is as manly and normal as meat and yogurt.

After the ten to fifteen minute massage, he’ll soap you up and begin your cleaning. It is at this point you’ll feel like the family dog in a tin bucket, maneuvered this way and that by beings above your level of comprehension. He’ll spin you around, soaping you up like the dirty cocker spaniel you are before dumping bowls of hot water on you to remove the bubbles. Then, off to the shampoo station.

hamam2 1 OTP’s Guide to the Turkish Baths (What’d You Say About My Hamam!?)

Now, you’re still a dog and you’re trapped, sitting on a stool as shampoo is professionally delivered onto your scalp. Your back and neck cracked and fingers popped, you will be washed off with more bowls of hot water. With the formal gauntlet over, you may be solicited for a tip, though this is not common or necessary.

Recovery

Go back into the steamy main chamber and enter one of the little sub-rooms with the fountains. It will have the privacy necessary to clean your neglected areas. Stay and enjoy the steam or head to the jacuzzi and pool to relax. Once finished, you’ll trade your soaked waist towel for two large dry towels to take with you to change back into your civvies.

OTP Tip: The language barrier at the bath adds a level of confusion to the helplessness one can only feel whilst nude in a foreign land; emasculated and cleaned like a house pet. You won’t feel like an adult here, at least as a man. Experiences are not homogeneous and if you are a woman you may be pleased to note that the female bath attendants are reputedly far more nurturing than the men.

Either way, no visit to Turkey is complete without bathing. Its practice is so deeply associated with Turkey that whenever you mention your time in the country, people will ask you about the baths. You don’t want to constantly retell the story of how you missed perhaps the centerpiece of traditional Turkish culture. Swallow your pride, pony up the liras and get clean at the baths, cheapass!