Cathedrals of the Flesh (5 page)

'Yes, it's a nineteenth-century piece from the Caucasus. It's my most valuable piece. You have a good eye.'

'Does someone own this hamam, or is it property of the state?' I asked, steering the conversation back to what I was interested
in and curious to learn if Çemberlita? was part of a historic trust. It must be.

'I own the hamam,' he said, pushing back his shoulders. 'My family purchased Çemberlita? twenty-three years ago. My name is
Rusen.' And he stuck out his hand in greeting. I've never known serendipity greater than Turkish encounters — owners and experts
were always present instead of hidden behind screens of gatekeepers and bureaucracy. Right in front of us, the owner of a
piece of Ottoman history. How strange to think that an individual could own a national treasure in Turkey. It struck me as
the equivalent of a regular Joe owning Monticello or the Eiffel Tower.

'We want to open a hamam in America,' I told Rusen. After a week in Istanbul, I was becoming as extroverted as the Turks.
Withhold nothing, that was my new philosophy.

'An excellent idea. So many of my customers are curious Americans. Maybe we should go into business together,' he said, thinking
out loud. 'Definitely you should come with me to visit my other hamam in Bodrum, where I use thermal waters.' Another joy
of Turkish people, in addition to their extroversion, was their ability to think out loud — not imagining, as we Americans
often do, that daydreaming leads to a commitment. Baksim had already promised to provide 5 per cent of the capital for our
New York hamam, but I took his intention as a show of support instead of a number with five zeros attached.

I looked through the doorway into the large open-plan two-storied reception area, with a balustrade belting the private rooms
and hallway on the second floor. A dark, bony man emerged from a changing compartment on the second floor, dressed only in
a
pestamal,
a piece of plaid fabric worn like a wraparound skirt on men or like a beach towel on women.

'That's called the
camek
â
n,
or reception area,' explained Rusen. 'Men change upstairs and women have a separate locker room. After your bath, I invite
you to come back here for tea and orange juice. You will be my guest.'

I peered into the
camekân;
mostly I saw corpulent Turkish women in baggy cotton dresses, smoking cigarettes.

'Those are some of the masseuses on break,' Rusen explained.

Marina asked, 'This is one of Istanbul's older hamams, isn't it?'

'Yes, it's one of ten still-functioning historic hamams. It was commissioned by the powerful mother of Murat the Third. Her
name was Nur-u Banu Sultan, and she hired Mimar Sinan to design it. You know Mimar Sinan?'

'The name sounds familiar,' I lied.

'Mimar Sinan is Turkey's most famous architect. He died at ninety-seven and not by natural causes. He was the Ottoman Empire's
architect under Süleyman the Magnificent; that is how you call him. In Turkey we call him Süleyman the Lawgiver. Sinan designed,
or oversaw, the construction of over twelve hundred buildings, including thirty-two hamams.'

'So when was this built?' I asked, not familiar with the time of Murat Ill's reign.

'In 1584, near the end of Sinan's life.'

'This hamam is over four hundred years old,' I said, incredulous. Eighteen generations of Turks and two generations of foreigners
had passed through these halls in search of water, gossip, rejuvenation, an afternoon without their veil, ritual ablution,
a wife for their son, steam, heat, and, most recently, a living history museum.

'Yes, this hamam has seen a lot of sultans. You know, the sultan would make sure that his advisers stayed very close to the
hamam owners. Why?' Rusen was getting Socratic on us. 'Because revolutionaries conspired at the hamam. They would stand next
to the
kurnas,
turn the water on full throttle, and plot a takeover of Topkapi Palace and the Seraglio Point; at least that was the legend.
Hamam owners received kickbacks to watch the comings and goings of suspicious characters.' Nowadays, the Turkish men milling
about in the Çemberlita?
camekân
still look suspicious, but more likely than not they're discussing a new Turkcell phone plan or a hot new nightclub in Tiinel
rather than plotting Ankara's takeover.

We thanked Rusen for the history lesson. So what if the only Turks in the room would be the masseuses; at least we could use
this as a jumping-off point to plan our hamam. It would inspire us architecturally, and maybe we'd found ourselves an experienced
business partner.

Rusen had modernized the women's changing area so it resembled a gym locker room, and Marina and I wrinkled our noses at each
other, hoping this would be the only modernized area. Wearing our
pestamals,
which looked like tablecloths we'd pinched from a Fourth of July picnic - blue-and-yellow checks for me, red and-black for
Marina — and clomping along in
nahn,
wooden hamam flip-flops (think Turkish Dr. Scholl's), we felt like the miscast leads of a Turkish /
Love Lucy.
The shoes were two sizes too small, so we walked with the deliberation of dressage horses. Had it not been for Kemal's comment
'a very unhygienic business,' I would have ditched the
nahn
altogether.

First we walked through the
so
ukluk,
a warm passageway that once served as the delicate appetizer to the hotter
stcakhk.
Nowadays customers bolt straight to the
stcakhk,
forgoing the more modest heat of the
so
ukluk,
altogether. But the
so
ukluk,
is an important place to remember if you're looking for the more banal outlets of a hamam - like the toilet — as it's invariably
in this tepid hallway. Though I hasten to add that visiting the lavatory in a hamam can instantly kill the romance of a dreamy
drift back in time.

We opened the warped wood door of the
stcakhk
and a gust of humid air rolled over us. It felt as if we'd walked into a tropical cumulous cloud hanging over Barbados. The
barometric pressure was so high that my contact lenses balked for a moment and then gratefully accepted the humidity. The
mist cleared from my eyes. I suddenly remembered a line from the travel journal of Julia Pardoe, who visited a hamam in the
1830s: 'For the first few moments, I was bewildered; the heavy, dense, sulphureous vapour that filled the place, almost suffocated
me.' Miss Pardoe had wondered whether the scene in the hamam was a creation of her 'distempered brain,' and I sympathized
with the overwhelmed Englishwoman.

I clutched Marina's arm and we stood side by side, taking in the dimensions of this vast marble cavern topped with a Pantheon-size
dome. It was enormous. Monumental and palatial. Big enough to accommodate the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and certainly a good
climate for them.

The domes upon domes and tons of marble created the most astonishing acoustics. Again, I thought of Miss Pardoe, who was deafened
by 'the wild, shrill cries of the slaves peeling through the reverberating domes of the bathing-halls, enough to awaken the
very marble with which they were lined.' The halls still echoed with shouting, whistling, splashing, and laughing. Anyone
sense-experiencing this room for the first time would be dazzled and overwhelmed; all five senses experiencing it in tandem
were vying for attention amid sensory chaos.

Fanning off from the central octagonal room were small individual washing areas,
'
halvets,'
said Marina, 'and the basins are called
kurnas.
One hundred years ago they would have had elaborate silver or brass faucets, but everything was stolen, now just basic spigots
remain.'

We had arrived at 7:00 P.M., prime time, and Çemberlita? was crowded with thirty or so women like ourselves, foreigners in
Istanbul trying to resurrect an Ottoman lifestyle that sighed its last gasps a good eighty years ago. The
g
ö
bektasi,
a.k.a. the bellystone, was a massive octagonal crater of interlocking marble slabs, five times the size of the quaint little
bellystones we had seen in Paris. The
göbektasi
is always in the center of the
stcakhk
and lies directly over the hamam's heater so that it's the warmest spot, the place for tight, stressed shoulders to melt into
the marble in preparation for a hamam scrubbing.

'Marina, look at that
g
ö
bektasi
!'

'How many tons of marble do you think are in the room?' said Marina, similarly awestruck, though this was her second visit
to Çemberlita?. 'They must have emptied Carrara for this.'

'This must be Turkish marble,' I said, remembering that
marmara
was the generic Greek word for marble because so much of it came from quarries by the Marmara Sea.

Lying on the slabs of marble were ten women being worked on by ten hamam ladies, who undeniably looked rather similar. Baksim
had told me there was an expression 'fat as a hamam lady.' At the time I thought he was being unkind, but he'd covered only
the half of it. The hamam ladies all wore black bikini bottoms, actually

We probably had at least a half-hour wait before jumping on the bellystone, but that was the perfect amount of preparation
time. Other newcomers, without a Marina of their own, looked lost, confused, and overwhelmed. Arriving in the
stcakhk
for the first time is slightly akin to showing up for your first therapy session. You enter a strange room and are told, 'This
is your time.' And there's a paralyzing trepidation as you think, This is my time? What do you mean, it's my time? Ask me
some questions, give me some tasks to perform, and I'll interpret, but don't make me invent. Time in a hamam is similarly
unstructured. But hamam therapy has two big advantages over psychotherapy. First, there is no therapist to entertain with
witticisms from your, hopefully, hilariously neurotic life. And second, being physically nude speeds you to a state of emotional
nudity, a stripping away of pretense and Prada. underwear (why stand on ceremony?), and flip-flops. Nothing else bound their
flesh. Their figures had long ceased to be girlish, and their breasts tumbled toward the floor. They possessed the build,
uniform, and strength of sumo wrestlers. That might be my body in thirty years, I thought with a strange sense of calm.

Marina and I found a
kurna
of our own in an unoccupied
halvet.
The words
kurna, gobektasi,
and
halvet
were starting to roll off my tongue, I felt so much a part of their Ottoman world. The
kurnas
deep marble basin overflowed with warm water, creating a continuous stream across the marble floor and into a gutter that
circled the room. One could play a sophisticated game of bobbing for apples. Peering into the
kurna,
I noticed a faint green hue to the water created by the cast of the marble and the depth of the water. The gushing water created
a feeling of largesse that in the old days, when water was something that came out of a well, bucket by bucket, must have
felt like the ultimate luxury. I liked to imagine that Justinian built his cistern to feed the baths. We found a stack of
turquoise-and-pink plastic hamam bowls,
hamam
tasis,
that a hundred years ago would have been carved, perhaps even jewel encrusted, in expensive materials like silver, gold, or
bronze.