Filed under: culture, Customs & Rituals, hammam, turkey, turkish bath
Scrubbed, Pummeled and Sweaty: the Hammam Turkish Bath Experience
A mandatory Turkish experience in Turkey is to partake in one of the oldest rituals in Turkey, the Turkish bath.
Found all over the Middle East, the Hammam experience isn’t exactly your gentle spa experience. First of all, your aesthetician most often resembles a hairy heavyweight wrestler. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
Most high-end hotels in Turkey tend to have their own toned-down version, but to experience the real thing, you need to swallow your uneasiness (and modesty) and head to where the Turks go.
Basically, it goes like this: Hang out in a steam room until you think you’re going to faint. Bathing suit optional. Take a cold shower. Jump into an even colder pool. More steam room. Lie on a hot marble circular slab for additional steaming. Put hygiene (or lack of) thoughts out of your mind. Lie on a rectangular marble slab. Get violently scrubbed and exfoliated by a large Turkish man. Get covered in foam. Shower. Remind yourself to put hygiene thoughts out of your mind. Get “massaged” (roughly smacked around). Rinse off in the shower.
Trust me, it’s way better than it sounds.
For some info on Hammams in Istanbul, check out this :
Tags: culture, Customs & Rituals, hammam, turkey, turkish bath
1 Comment
The last time I was in Turkey I did think about going to such a place, but the prospect of getting a rub down from a big hairy Turk didn’t appeal to me.