Then we had three. Now there are five and counting.It’s the same with hamams. Göreme never had its own hamam or public bathing culture, but now there are four Turkish baths in various states of completion dotted about the village. Two of them are inside luxury hotels but the other two will be battling for the same pool of passing customers. I can only hope it will be the beautiful replica of a Selçuk hamam that scoops the business and not the one housed in a concrete eye-sore that should never have been given planning permission.When I first came to live in Göreme my visits to a hamam were as much from necessity as pleasure. Although there was a bathroom of sorts in my rented home it had no heating, which rendered it virtually unusable for the four months of winter. The house was at the top of a hill and for the three months of high summer, low pressure rarely pushed water up to it, which left only five months of the year during which I could be certain of bathing in comfort.
Fortunately, Nevşehir still has a functioning hamam that caters to locals. It’s part of the Damat İbrahim Paşa Mosque complex and dates from 1727, which means that by Turkish standards it’s a relatively new bath. Nevşehir being the conservative place it is, women are only admitted for six hours a week on Saturdays. Consequently at times when the “kadınlara” (for women) sign is up, the bath can be so busy that your skin resembles a dried apricot by the time the masseuse sets to work on it.
Still, no crowds in Nevşehir could ever compare with those I once found in a hamam in the back streets of Urfa. There, a din reminiscent of a school playground at break time assailed my ears before I even opened the door. Inside the lobby was so full of bulbous bodies that it was hard to find a corner to undress. Most of the women were Arabs with blue tattoos on their chins and foreheads. My arrival caused a momentary lull in their conversation, but then the presence of the yabancı was processed and forgotten, and the women resumed their picnicking and dancing. It cost only a handful of kuruş to use that bath, so many of them spent most of the day there.
Two years later I returned to the hamam to find a very different picture. Gone were the crowds of women, and the bathroom, when I entered it, was conspicuously cool. But, turning to leave, I found my exit blocked by a mountain of a woman.
“Where are you going?” she demanded.
“It’s cold in there,” I stammered.
“The heat will come soon,” she barked. Then she spun me round, inserted a finger into the small of my back and propelled me back to the basins.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
