Cathedrals of the Flesh (7 page)

•
Bosphorus Princess Hotel.
A kitsch hotel bath. Small, clean, boring, architecturally flat. Might as well be in an American gym steamroom.

•
Baths of Roxelana.
Now a carpet store and the ideal place to see a Mimar Sinan—designed hamam without taking off your clothes.

•
Dolmabah
ç
e Palace.
The most beautiful hamam in the world, adorned with honey-colored alabaster delicately carved so as to give the impression
of snowflakes masquerading as lace. To see the sultans' former hamam, you must take the Dolmabahçe Palace tour while wearing
surgical slippers over your shoes.

•
Beylerbeyi.
We peeked into this stunning gem of a neighborhood hamam on the Asian side, just next door the Beylerbeyi Sarayi (palace).
It was about to close for the day.

•
Ç
inili
in Üsküdar. Marina and I arrived during the men's hours and were given a tour and invited to bathe. We declined, recognizing
this as the 'bad' kind of adventure. This old-school hamam is a rare find, though. They have several styles of pestamals depending
on whether you're bathing or resting.

• Kalig Ali Pasa
in Tophane. We managed also to hit this old Mimar Sinan—designed hamam during men's hours and were invited to tour the
stcakhk.
Immeasurably grand and sorrowfully neglected, this is the only hamam in which I saw a cockroach.

Marina and I had taken the measurements. Ca
alo
lu had the best architecture, Çemberlita? the best management and a close
second in ambiance, Tarabya the nicest changing area and
camekân.
Galatasaray was everything we didn't want to be (apple tea pushers and baksheesh seekers), and the neighborhood hamams all
had sweet hamam ladies who acted like adoptive mothers.

Despite our action-packed three days, I felt that my work was just beginning, my interest growing rather than satisfied. Getting
a handle on the hamam's architecture and accoutrements only raised more questions. Where did the hamam tradition come from?
Surely from the Roman baths. The hamam, after all, was an Islamic interpretation of the Roman bath. And where might I find
an enduring bath culture? A place where a visit to the baths might serve the same social function as meeting at a restaurant
for dinner. In Turkey, the hamam no longer played the coffeehouse role, but perhaps the Russians, Finns, and Japanese were
still bathing with frolicsome abandon. I needed to find out.

Midway through my stay in Istanbul, I was still looking for the historic neighborhood baths I had read about.

Now and then, usually about once in a week, my grandmother had a sociable turn of mind and when these moods came upon her
she invariably went to the Hamam. Hamams, or the Turkish Baths, were hot-beds of gossip and scandal-mongering, snobbery in
its most inverted form and the excuse for every woman in the district to have a day out. Nobody ever dreamed of taking a bath
in anything under seven or eight hours. The young girls went to show off their pink-and-white bodies to the older women. Usually
the mothers of eligible sons were in their minds for this purpose for these would, it was to be hoped, take the first opportunity
of detailing to their sons the finer points of So-and-so's naked body. Marriages based on such hearsay quite frequently took
place, but whether or not they were successful few of us had any means of knowing.

- Irfan Orga,
Portrait of a Turkish Family

Where was this bath described by Irfan Orga? After Marina left I was determined to find it. The closest I came was my favorite
neighborhood hamam, where once, no doubt, a crop of eligible women paraded for the mothers of eligible sons. A longtime resident
of Istanbul whom I'd met at the rug bazaar told me about the Aga hamam, describing it as an authentic old-school hamam with
unpredictable, sometimes unorthodox activity, the kind of place rarely stumbled upon by travelers. Perfect, it was surrounded
by a virtual velvet rope of anonymity. It was in an obvious enough spot, but it called no attention to itself and was the
retiring younger sister of the evil, pushy Galatasaray hamam up the street. The hamam was on a small, tangled side street
called Turnacibasi Sokaga, just south of Istiklal Caddesi, a buzzing pedestrian shopping arcade, where once all the foreign
embassies were located until Atatürk's made Ankara Turkey's capital (Istanbul had too much emotional baggage).

When I first showed up at the Aga hamam, the
hammaci,
the lady who takes your money at the entrance, examined me curiously.
'Hamami?'
she probed.

'Evet hamami,'
I confirmed, and I pulled out my own
hamam tasi
and
kese
mitt that I'd acquired at the Grand Bazaar's Hamam Store. She looked impressed - she obviously had thought I'd entered the
wrong door — and called over some of the other hamam ladies. They nodded appreciatively that I'd amassed my own tools of the
trade.

After my fourth visit, they stopped treating me like a lost animal but instead welcomed me with,
'Merhaba Alexia.'
Every visit, the same hamam lady would scrub me (her name was Neuron; at least that was how it sounded), and she liked to
point out that we had the same color blue eyes. I'd even managed to make a friend, a Chinese film editor who had lived in
Istanbul for two years. She invited me to a film screening. Perhaps hamam society was still alive.

One afternoon I invited Kelly to join me at the hamam; she was a thirty-year-old American dance teacher living in Istanbul
whom I'd recently been introduced to. I had told Kelly how proprietorial the hamam ladies were, how if a man stumbled into
the reception area during the women's hours, he was booted out the door, literally sent running down the street to the bakery
where they make
simits,
a cross between a sesame bagel and a pretzel. I'm convinced this is why so many old, leather-skinned guys sat on chairs outside
along the sidewalk. Watching the world walk by, sure, but also waiting for the latest installment of A?a hamam drama.

I expected Kelly to be totally at ease with the nudity and physical license inside the hamam; she was a dancer after all.
Luckily, she was a dancer who believed in regular meals, so getting naked together wasn't a skin-and-bones reminder of why
I'd quit ballet at twelve. But despite her comfort with her own body, Kelly's jaw still dropped in shock when we entered the
small, stunning
stcakhk.
Nude splashing bodies, old withered breasts, mounds of flesh, friendly shouting, a woman sitting on her haunches scrubbing
her undergarments, everything so carnal and so raw. It was a parade of humanity that you'd never be able to assemble. But
here it happened every day.

A mother and her young daughter bathed together on this afternoon. There was nothing unusual about this. Kelly and I were
lying next to each other on the small intimate bellystone, and the cries of the two-year-old daughter with long corkscrew
curls grew louder and louder. Soap must have gotten in her eyes. The screams went on for longer than they should have. Kelly
and I commented, 'Oh the poor little girl,' when what we were really thinking was, Get that little girl out of here. Just
as we were having these wicked thoughts, a huge tall figure in a thick pink terrycloth robe burst through the door with a
small terrier dog in tow. I didn't know which was stranger - the presence of the monstrously large woman or the dog. From
my vertical vantage point on the
g
ö
bekta
?
i,
I looked directly at her hands - large knuckles, thick boxy fingers, and chipped coral fingernail polish. Unmistakably the
hands of a man. 'Kelly, I think she's a man.'

The pink-robed figure raised her baritone voice and started scolding the young mother to hush her child. The child, scared
or fascinated by the presence of the dog, was instantly quiet. The baritone's hair was in a turban, and as soon as the child
stopped crying she turned on her heels and left the hamam, depriving us of a good look at her chiseled face.

The Aga hamam, more than any other bath I visited, made me think of the greatest bath movie ever made,
Steam: The Turkish Bath.
In this Italian movie, a young, career-obsessed Italian interior designer arrives in Istanbul to settle the estate of his
estranged aunt. He is embraced by the Turkish family his aunt lived with, and he sees the hamam that his aunt used to operate.
Slowly, as he is seduced by the pace of Turkish culture, he begins to understand the peculiar magic of his aunt's life in
Istanbul, the charm of Turkish people, and he discovers a calmer, more sensual part of himself during visits to the hamam.
He decides not to sell the hamam, but rather to stay in Istanbul to restore it and possibly to reopen it. Every feeling in
that movie resonated with me. The seduction of Turkish life, the desire to wake up every morning to the sound of a muezzin's
call to prayer and walk, across the domed skyline, to work at a twenty-first-century hamam.

Kemal regarded all the time I spent in hamams with a blend of curiosity and suspicion. He used to drop by the house fairly
often to pick up his mail or collect a book. Sometimes it seemed, or I flattered myself, that he dropped by more often than
was necessary. Once he stopped by at 10:00 P.M. while I was out. He left a note: 'What goes on in these hamams at this hour?
I must know . . .' I called him at his house in Tuzla to tell him about the drag queen, and he invited me to a record release
party the next night at a club called, of all things, Hamam. The party reminded me of all that I wasn't homesick for. 'The
DJ is from New York,' the crowd murmured with excitement, 'and Junior Vasquez is coming next week.' Everyone seemed perfectly
happy that Hamam was no longer a place where people washed one another's backs. I would trade Junior Vasquez and the dreadlocked
DJ for the fat hamam ladies in a New York minute.

Kemal, wearing a fisherman's sweater, didn't look as slick as the other partygoers, but he knew a lot of them and introduced
me to a stream of people. 'I thought you might be homesick and enjoy a party like this,' he yelled over the noise.

'Actually, I prefer the tranquillity of Tuzla or drinking raki somewhere quiet,' I said.

'Me too,' he said, taking my hand and leading me through the throng of bouncing, sweaty bodies.

The next morning, I accompanied Kemal to Tuzla to check on progress at his dig. The rubble and debris were completely cleared,
and I noticed that the
pilae,
the short pillars of terra-cotta, were stacked in three piles in one corner.

'Kemal, why did you move the
pilae?
I asked calmly, trying to mask my horror.

'We needed to clear the bath.'

'But the
pilae
are an integral part of the bath. I may have to call the authorities. These are highly erratic excavation methods.'

Kemal did not think this was funny. 'I wanted to get everything cleaned out,' he said again, seeming not to understand that
he had essentially removed part of the foundation.

'You plan to turn this into a pottery studio, don't you?' I asked, remembering his original plan.

He looked away. Our notion of restoring the bath was dissolving in front of my eyes. Kemal stared at the middle of the floor
and was, I guessed, imagining where he was going to place the throwing wheel and not the bellystone.

'I'm not sure yet,' he said. 'It depends if you stay and help me.' I shouldn't have been tempted, but I was, very much.

That afternoon, five of Kemal's friends arrived for another Marmara Sea tea party. Only this time, instead of feeling like
an interloper, I helped prepare the tea and made sure Kemal remembered to put the sugar cubes on the tray. His friends were
less soulful and more self-assured than Kemal. They had professions and children. One couple had just returned from three
years in L.A. and wondered if there were any new bagel bakeries in Istanbul. In fact there was, a small chain called Tribeca.
Another friend, an architect, had just launched a business where you design your own Turkish rug on-line and he has it delivered
to your house a month later. Two of them had never been to a hamam.