The eastern or Turkish bath

by Sir Erasmus Wilson

My friend Mr. George Witt, having recently visited the ruins of the ancient Roman bath still existing at No. 117, Bridge-street, Chester, describes it as follows:—

"The most interesting of all the Roman antiquities of this ancient city are the remains of a private Roman bath, showing the Hypocaustum, or heating place beneath, in a state of great preservation. The hypocaust is 18 feet long by 8 feet wide, and 3 feet high. The roof was supported on thirty-two stone pillars (of a single block), broader at the base and the top, and narrower in the middle; of these twenty-eight still remain. On the top of the columns are placed, by way of capitals, strong tiles from 17 to 23 inches square, and 3 inches thick, reaching from pillar to pillar, thus forming, at the same time, the roof of the hypocaust and the floor of the room above. Over all these is a bed of hard concrete, 9 or 10 inches thick, the whole suited to bear any amount of heat. The pillars are made of the red sandstone of the district, and are so far worthy of note, that they differ from the tile-columns of most of the Roman hypocausts found in other parts of England, which are chiefly formed of piles of 8-inch tiles, 2 inches thick.

"The room above the hypocaust, which was the hot-chamber of the bath, called the Caldarium, has unfortunately been so dismantled, that little or nothing can now be learned of its character or proportions, two of the side walls only remain. The walls of these hot-chambers are generally on the inside by ranges of hollow flue-tiles, coming up from the hypocaust below, varying in number, according to the degree of heat required.

"There is nothing whatever here left of the Frigidarium, or cooling-room, nor any other of the apartments of the bath, nor of any of the contrivances used therein, except a sort of tank, 7 feet deep, 10 feet long, and 4 feet wide, situate near the mouth of the furnace, which may have served either as a receptacle for warm water, or as a place for a plunge in cold water, after the previous processes of the bath had been completed.

"Like modern Rome, the present city of Chester stands some feet above the level of the old Roman city; the visitors, therefore, must be prepared to descend into a dark cellar, to inspect the hypocaust and so-called bath! and to emerge therefrom, with a bitter feeling of humiliation and regret, that our forefathers could have so ruthlessly destroyed these interesting evidences of the manners and customs of that wonderful people, who for upwards of four hundred years held dominion over this island—a people to whom we are indebted for the fundamental principles of our social civilization; for the introduction of architecture, sculpture, coinage of money, construction of roads, and for innumerable other arts and adornments of life. There can be no more instructive proof of the mental darkness of those ages which followed the overthrow of the Roman Empire, than the wholesale destruction of the buildings of that great people, of which this is an example; and it is to be lamented that this barbarism, in regard to such monuments of antiquity, has not yet altogether disappeared."

And where, it may be asked, is the bath now; the conquering Romans have ceased to be other than a name, or a weary lesson for schoolboys; the Romans are gone, the Roman bath is lost. But here an eloquent modern author, Mr. Urquhart, helps us in our difficulty with a quotation:—"A people who know neither Latin nor Greek have preserved this great monument of antiquity on the soil of Europe, and present to us, who teach our children only Latin and Greek, this Institution in all its Roman grandeur and its Grecian taste. The bath, when first seen by the Turks, was a practice of their enemies, religious and political; they were themselves the filthiest of mortals; yet no sooner did they see the bath than they adopted it, made it a rule of their society, a necessary adjunct to every settlement, and Princes and Sultans endowed such institutions for the honour of their name." This, then, is the answer to the question—Where is the bath now? The ancient Roman bath lives in its modern offspring, the Turkish Bath—the Turkish Hamâm.

When, therefore, we see the words "Turkish Bath" in grand letters paraded through our metropolis; when we see a human being performing the part of a sandwich, with a broadsheet of Turkish bath in front, and a similar sheet behind, himself representing a flattened anchovy between the two slices, we shall know that the ancient Roman bath, after being kept alive for many centuries by the fostering care of the Turks, has at last come back to revisit its ancient haunts, and to offer to modern Britons the enjoyments from which our forefathers turned away with contempt as a custom of their conquerors. And we are led to recognise the truth of my preliminary proposition—that the bath is an instinct, and that, being an instinct, its survival of a race is no longer a wonder, but is a law of nature—a law of the universe.

Let me now describe the Hamâm, or Turkish Bath as it exists at the present moment in Constantinople; and in this description I shall take as my groundwork the account given of it by Mr. Urquhart. It is a large building, with a domed roof, a square massive body, from which minarets shoot up, and against which wings abut containing side apartments. The essential apartments of the hamâm are three in number—a great hall or mustaby, a middle chamber, and an inner chamber. We raise the curtain which covers the entrance to the street, and we find ourselves in the mustaby, a circular or octagonal hall, maybe a hundred feet high, with a domed roof, and open in the centre to the vault of heaven. In the middle of the floor is a basin of water four feet high, with a fountain playing in the centre, and around it are plants and trellises; and resting against it, at some one point, the stall whence comes the supply of coffee and pipes or chibouques.

Around the circumference of the hall is a low platform, from four to twelve feet in breadth and three feet high. This is divided by dwarf balustrades into small compartments, each containing one or more couches. These compartments are the dressing-rooms, and the couches, shaped like a straddling letter W, and adapted by their angles to the bends of the body, are the couches of repose. It is here that the bather disrobes; his clothes are folded and placed in a napkin, and the napkin is carefully tied up. He then assumes the bathing garb; a long Turkish towel (peshtimal or futa) is wound turban-wise around his head; a second around his hips, descending to the middle of the leg; and a third, disposed like a scarf over one or both shoulders. Two attendants shield him from view while changing his linen, by holding a napkin before him; and when he is ready, the same attendants help him to descend from the platform; they place wooden pattens (called nalma in Turkish, and cob cob in Arabic) on his feet, and taking each arm, lead him to the middle apartment. The wooden pattens are intended to protect the feet from the heat of the inner rooms, and from the dirty water and slop of the passages.