If you want to see a historic Turkish bath, or hammam, in Türkiye, there are two kinds of place to look for. One is the bath that has become a museum, where you walk through the old rooms and see what went on in them: the best known are in İstanbul, with others in Beypazarı near Ankara, in Gaziantep and in Eskişehir. The other is the old bath that still works as a bath, and here the list runs from fourteenth-century buildings in Bolu and Mudurnu to the bazaar bath of Safranbolu and the medieval Sultan bath of Tokat. The places below are grouped by city, and every one links to a full guide.
How an Ottoman bath is laid out
Nearly all the buildings below share one sequence, worth knowing before you go. You enter a changing room, also called the cool room, then pass into a warm room, a halfway stage between outside air and full heat, and from there into the hot room. Behind the hot room lie the water tank and the furnace that heated it all. Many of the larger baths are double baths: a men's half and a women's half built against each other, often with their doors on different streets, so that both could draw on one furnace and one set of tanks.
İstanbul: two baths that became museums
In Fatih, the Bayezid II Hamam now houses the Turkish Bath Culture Museum, which opened in 2015 and calls itself the first hamam museum in Türkiye. The bath dates from about 1507-1508 and was given to the public by Gülbahar Hatun, the sultan's wife; it belongs to the Bayezid II complex and so lies within the Historic Areas of İstanbul, a UNESCO World Heritage site. It also carries a second name, the Patrona Hamam, after the attendant Halil whose role in the revolt of 1730 is said to have begun here. Visitors go in by the women's changing room and the bathing objects are set out in cases fitted into the rooms themselves.
The Zeyrek Çinili Hamam Museum is a different kind of visit. Digging done while it was being restored brought up thousands of tile fragments, and the museum now follows the site from the fifth century to the twentieth. Its theme is water: the bath stands over a Byzantine cistern, was fed by the Kırkçeşme system, and digital panels show how the water came in and went out.
Bath museums in Beypazarı, Gaziantep and Eskişehir
The Turkish Bath Museum in Beypazarı, in Ankara province, opened on 9 June 2012 inside the sixteenth-century Rüstem Pasha Bath. Each room is used to explain itself. The cool room shows silk wraps and silver-trimmed clogs; the warm room, kept for the old, the frail and young brides, has towel sets and olive oil soaps; the shaving room recalls the barbers who also applied leeches and cupping; and the hot room is split in two to stage the wedding baths of groom and bride. Guides and storytellers carry the tradition on through games and re-enactments.
Gaziantep's Bath Museum fills the Paşa Hamamı, built by Lala Mustafa Paşa in 1577 and opened as a museum in 2015. The city's baths were sunk below the street, so you go down a flight of steps into the cool room. In the hot room is the feature the museum singles out: the gulleytin, a mikveh pool used by Jewish bathers for spiritual cleansing. Wax figures act out Ottoman bath customs.
In Eskişehir, a city with thermal springs reaching into its centre, the Hamam Museum in the Odunpazarı district tells the long history of bathing from Roman times to Ottoman baths, and the staff who ran a bath, from the tellak to the kulhanbeyi at the furnace.
Early Ottoman baths in Bolu, Mudurnu and İznik
Bolu province holds an unusual cluster of early Ottoman baths. In Bolu itself the Orta Hamam, also known as the Yıldırım bath, is dated by its inscription to 1389 and was built by the architect Ömer bin İbrahim; light falls through small glazed openings in its domes onto a rich interior. The same architect had built the Yıldırım Bayezid bath in Mudurnu in 1382, beside the mosque of that name. The provincial directorate ranks it among the finest baths of its time, pointing to the portal with its muqarnas and to the way the dome sits on its drum. Both are double baths, and the Mudurnu one is still in use as a bath.
At İznik, near the İstanbul gate, the İsmail Bey bath is a ruin under a protective steel roof. Its founder and date are uncertain; most scholars take it for an Ottoman work of the fourteenth century; its four surviving domed rooms, roofed in brick with muqarnas, make it an important building for historians of Turkish architecture.
Old baths still in use
In Safranbolu the Cinci bath, built by Cinci Hüseyin Hoca, stands on Kazdaglioglu Square in the old bazaar. Restored by the General Directorate of Foundations, it works as a bath, with men's and women's halves of matching plan, each reached from a different street.
Tokat has two. The Sultan bath in the Su İçmez neighbourhood is two mirror-image baths whose plan suggests the early 13th century; small glass openings in its domes let in daylight. The Ali Paşa bath, a double bath east of the Ali Paşa mosque and dated with it to 1572, was badly damaged in the earthquakes of 1939 and 1943 and repaired.
In the centre of Aksaray, the six-domed Paşa bath was built by Hacı Ali Pasha, chamberlain to Abdülhamid II, and is the only bath there still serving its first purpose; its entrance hall keeps a six-sided pool. At Eğirdir, the Esma Sultan bath, locally the Çarşı bath, is traditionally credited to Dündar Bey of the Hamidoğulları and dated 1307–08, though no inscription or deed survives; after work finished in 2014 it went back to being a bath. In the centre of Süleymanpasa, Tekirdağ, the Yalı bath, a double bath of the 1600s, reopened after a restoration that ran from 2018 to 2020.
More historic baths around the country
In Ankara, the Karacabe bath gave its name to Hamamönü, the restored quarter of timber houses and mansions in Altındağ. In Kars, the Cuma bath of 1863 near the Taş Köprü was named for serving women on Fridays. In Trabzon the Hasan Paşa bath, completed in 1882 for soldiers, has been restored by the Ortahisar municipality as a museum. In Mardin, the Savurkapı bath beside the Hatuniye medrese is dated to around 1176-77 from the medrese's endowment deed of 1206. One warning: the Süleyman Paşa bath in İzmit, built by a son of Orhan Gazi, is closed to visitors, so it can only be seen from outside.
