Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı

Few buildings in Istanbul have better neighbours than the Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı. It stands in the open ground between the Hagia Sophia and the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, on a site where the city's baths have a very long pedigree: this was the location of the Baths of Zeuxippus, the great public baths of Roman and Byzantine Constantinople. In 1556 Hürrem Sultan — known in Europe as Roxelana, the powerful consort of Süleyman the Magnificent — commissioned a new bath here from the court architect Mimar Sinan, as a charitable foundation to serve the congregation of the Hagia Sophia, which had been a mosque for a century.

Sinan made it a long, disciplined composition some 75 metres from end to end. Like other Ottoman double baths it has separate sections for men and women, but instead of placing them side by side he set them one behind the other on a single north–south axis, a layout that was new in Turkish bath architecture. The result is a mirror-image building: from each end, a bather passes from a domed changing hall through a cool room to a hot room, with the men's half to the north and the women's to the south. The changing halls are lit by pointed-arched windows, and in the hot rooms octagonal marble platforms stand under the domes, surrounded by small domed cubicles for private washing.

Its later history is a reminder of how easily such buildings can drift from their purpose. By the late nineteenth century the bath had been abandoned; it served for a time as a storehouse, was restored in 1916–17 and again in 1957–58, and spent decades as a state carpet showroom. A three-year restoration begun in 2008 returned it to its original function, and since 2011 it has again been a working hamam, so that the steam, the marble and the filtered light under the domes can once more be experienced as Sinan intended.

Seen from the square, its long, low mass crowned by domes forms a quiet counterpoint to the two giants on either side, and it is worth walking its full length to appreciate how cleverly the symmetrical plan is expressed on the outside.

Getting there

The bathhouse stands in Sultanahmet, between the Hagia Sophia and the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, about 1.3 km from Eminönü on the Golden Horn. Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen International Airport (SAW) is about 30 km away. The T1 tram stop at Sultanahmet is a short walk away.