Çemberlitaş Hamamı

Çemberlitaş Hamamı has been heating water and steam on the same corner of old Istanbul since 1584. It was founded by Nurbanu Sultan, the widow of Selim II and mother of Murad III, as a charitable endowment: the bath's takings went to support the great mosque complex she had built across the Bosphorus in Üsküdar, the Atik Valide. The design is traditionally credited to Mimar Sinan, the architect of the Süleymaniye, though it was most likely carried out by the team of builders working under him rather than by the master himself. It stands on the Divanyolu, the ceremonial avenue of the Ottoman capital, directly opposite the Column of Constantine, a relic of the Roman city known in Turkish as Çemberlitaş, which gives the neighbourhood and the bath their name.

It was built as a classic double hamam, with men's and women's sections laid out side by side. Each follows the sequence of Ottoman bathing: a domed dressing hall, a warm intermediate room, and finally the hot room. The hot room is the reason to come. It is square in plan, but twelve columns set in a ring around the heated marble platform, the göbektaşı, make it read as a twelve-sided space. Above, the dome is pierced with small star-shaped openings, so daylight falls through the steam in narrow shafts onto the marble — one of the most beautiful effects in Ottoman architecture, and all the more striking because it is still used exactly as intended.

The street that made the bath's fortune also cost it part of its fabric. In the nineteenth century, when the old city received sewers and the Divanyolu was widened and realigned, part of the building was demolished and its plan had to be adjusted. What survives is still a compact, dignified piece of Sinan-era architecture, its cluster of domes rising over the street corner, and a rare chance to experience a sixteenth-century imperial foundation by using it rather than looking at it.

Around it lies the historic peninsula at its densest, and the bath is best understood as one link in the chain of Ottoman foundations — mosques, schools, fountains and baths — that lined the old imperial avenue, where a working building like this one earned the income that kept a distant mosque running. A visit here, in the steam under the star-lit dome, is as close as most people will come to the everyday life those foundations were built to serve.

Getting there

The hamam stands in the Çemberlitaş quarter of the historic peninsula, about 1 km from Eminönü on the Golden Horn. The nearest airport is Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen International (SAW), about 31 km away on the Asian side. The T1 tram stops at Çemberlitaş, right beside the bath.