Cağaloğlu Hamamı: A Sultan's Bath of 1741
Why is it significant?
Catch your breath after the climb and look at the low domed building on the corner, its roof dotted with little glass eyes that let light fall into the steam below. This is Cağaloğlu Hamamı, and it has been washing Istanbul since 1741. It was built by Sultan Mahmud the First, but not for himself.
Key Facts
| Place | Cağaloğlu Hamamı: A Sultan's Bath of 1741 |
|---|---|
| Address | Alemdar, Prof. Kazım İsmail Gürkan Caddesi No:24, 34110 Fatih/İstanbul, Türkiye |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.01070, 28.97560 |
| Part of Walk | Sultans' Gates: Topkapı, Gülhane & the Sublime Porte in Istanbul |
| Generated | Generated |
Catch your breath after the climb and look at the low domed building on the corner, its roof dotted with little glass eyes that let light fall into the steam below. This is Cağaloğlu Hamamı, and it has been washing Istanbul since 1741.
It was built by Sultan Mahmud the First, but not for himself. An Ottoman sultan who wanted to found a mosque, a school or a library also had to pay for it forever, so he endowed it with income-producing property. Mahmud had just opened a library inside Hagia Sophia, and the fees paid by bathers here were meant to keep that library running. Every scrub and every soak helped pay for books.
Inside, men and women have entirely separate sections, each with its own entrance. You pass from the domed changing hall to the warm room and on to the hot room, where a large heated marble platform, the göbek taşı, sits under a dome pierced by those star-shaped skylights. It is one of the last of the great monumental bathhouses built in the city in the Ottoman centuries. There, an attendant scrubs you with a rough mitt called a kese, then rinses you with bowls of warm water poured from marble basins.
For Istanbul families the hamam was never only about washing. Brides came here with their friends before a wedding, mothers looked over potential daughters-in-law, and news, gossip and arrangements passed between the marble basins. The neighbourhood bath was as much a social club as a bathroom.
Cağaloğlu itself became the street of newspapers in the twentieth century, when the presses of the Turkish dailies crowded along these slopes around the government buildings. Writers and editors who made and unmade governments in print lived and worked within a few streets of this steam. Walk east now, along the old street towards the great gate of the government, the one the whole world once called the Sublime Porte.