Guide
Eskişehir sits on natural and thermal springs that reach right into the city centre — the museum's own claim is that you would be hard put to find this anywhere else — and the Hamam Museum is the city's attempt to put that fact into a historical frame.
The museum treats bathing as a subject with a long chronology rather than a local curiosity. Its history section runs from early bathhouses through Roman and Byzantine baths, Islamic baths outside Anatolia, and then Seljuk and Ottoman ones. A second strand covers hamam culture: how bathing appears in art, and the people who staffed a bathhouse — the tellak and natir who washed and attended, the kulhanbeyi who tended the furnace, the pestamalci who handled the wraps, and the meydanci who kept the floor.
The museum is at Curukoglu Sokak No 2/D in the Sarkiye quarter of Odunpazarı. It opens 10:00 to 17:00 from Tuesday to Friday and at weekends, and closes on Mondays.
Visit status for this record: open to visitors.
