In a high-ceilinged marble room, where the stone is warm to touch and the sunlight streams in through delicately carved stars at the top of a dome, I am being slathered with a cloud of bubbles. If I squint, the celestial white blur before me would look a lot like how heaven is depicted in films, and it feels like it too. As warm water is gently poured over me to rinse the bubble blanket away, I’m left feeling the most pure, clean, and relaxed I think I have ever felt.
The sanctuary I’ve spent the last hour in is a newly opened, luxury Turkish bath, or hamam, in the Zeyrek neighbourhood of Istanbul. Euromonitor International named the city the world’s most-visited in 2023, drawing in 20.2 million sightseers. The majority of those will have spent their time queuing for the Hagia Sophia Mosque, haggling at the spice bazaar or eating the famously fresh fish sandwiches (balık ekmek) down at the water’s edge. Few of these tourists will have heard of Zeyrek, let alone explored it.
A hilltop neighbourhood on the European side of this continent-straddling city, Zeyrek overlooks the glittering Golden Horn and is home to some of the oldest residences in Istanbul and its best examples of Ottoman architecture. There is also the grand, 12th-century Molla Zeyrek Mosque, originally built as a Byzantine church, and the remains of a Roman aqueduct. It is little surprise that the neighbourhood is a Unesco World Heritage Site.
Compared to the loud, swirling city centre, there is a far more laid-back feel to this neighbourhood, which is home to around 12,000 residents. Zeyrek is a place of cobbled streets, verdant squares and cafés serving syrupy coffee for five lira (11p). And yet somehow, this corner of Istanbul has always been largely untapped by tourists and developers alike. Until now.
The Zeyrek Çinili Hamam is a new draw which is making the area a lot more well known. This traditional Turkish bath recently opened after an extensive, much-delayed restoration project by the Marmara Group, a luxury hotel and real estate company based in the city. Anyone who has ever done renovation work will be familiar with hold ups, but this is usually down to permits, orders or contractors going awry – not because the site you are working on dates back to the 1500s. “When we started the project, we were expecting to open in about three years’ time,” says Koza Gureli Yazgan, the hamam’s founding director and Marmara board member. “That was fourteen years ago.”
When the group bought the hamam in 2010, it was functional but run-down; covered in “mouldy plasterboard”. They never imagined that when they began to peel it back, they would discover that this was a site with many layers of important cultural history.
The 500-year-old bath house was designed by one of Turkey’s most famous Ottoman architects, Mimar Sinan, and was commissioned by Hayreddin Barbarossa, the grand admiral of the Ottoman Empire. It was covered in delicately decorated blue and white Iznik tiles (çinili is Turkish for “tiled”). In the 18th century, following earthquakes in the region, an antiques dealer from Paris bought some of the fragments, which have since ended up in displays in the Louvre, V&A and British Museum.
“But we didn’t know these stories when we first bought the building,” says Yazgan. “We didn’t know quite how special it was. The more we worked on it, the more we found.”
So much so that midway through the project, so many artefacts had been discovered that they decided to open a museum on the site too, helping to transform Çinili into the artistic hub it is today: alongside the baths, they run a busy calendar of exhibitions, talks and concerts.
“This cultural programme is a way of transforming it into a whole community space, which is what hamams have always been about,” says Anlam de Coster, the artistic director. “Art is also a great way of honouring and showcasing its history, because it encourages people to really connect with it in an emotional way.”
As true as this is, to fully understand its heritage, it would be remiss to visit Çinili without experiencing one of its hamam treatments. There are nine on offer – from indulgent 100-minute packages to half-hour foam massages – but I choose what is bound to become the most popular: The Original, a 60-minute traditional bathing ritual.
Wearing the disposable bikini provided, my experience begins with warm marble therapy, known as göbektaşı, which simply involves lying on the stone beneath the soaring dome and letting the stress of life melt away. My therapist then leads me through to one of the chambers and methodically massages, exfoliates and bathes my entire body with warm water from a brass bucket. As she washes my hair for me, I wonder when was the last time I ever felt so cared for – or so clean.
Traditionally, hamam culture was always about cleanliness. “In the 16th century, bathing here would have been an important ritual because people didn’t have showers at home,” says De Coster. “In Islam, hygiene is extremely significant – without a clean body, a Muslim should not pray – so people would go to the hamam at least twice a week out of necessity.”
Since, the connotations of Turkish baths have evolved. “With the Westernisation of domestic spaces, by the 20th century it almost became taboo to go to a hamam because it meant you weren’t rich enough to have your own bathroom at home,” she continues. A turning point was when Ferzan Özpetek’s romance film Hamam came out in 1997. “All of a sudden, people started to rediscover the beauty of bathing rituals, including tourists from all over the world, and there was an explosion of popularity,” she says. “Now, it is all about self-care; we view it similar to going to a spa.”
It certainly feels like it. Following the bathing ritual, I’m bundled up into fluffy white towels and taken through to a wood-panelled room to sip a basil sherbet tea. Here, the pin-striped loungers are contemporary and stylish – and yet they still somehow perfectly complement the historical elements such as the feature wall of ancient brick.
“It wasn’t easy getting that balance of old and new right,” Yazgan tells me. “When you are working with a building with so much important cultural heritage, it can be scary to intervene. But I think in the end, the architects managed to bring in contemporary touches without distracting from the history of the hamam.”
One of the genius modern interventions was swapping the men’s and women’s bathing sections. “What was formerly the men’s was the ‘nicer’ one because it is grander, with higher ceilings,” she says. “We decided to swap them to give women their much overdue turn, but we are planning to continue to rotate them throughout the year so everyone gets to experience both. We think this is a nice egalitarian approach.”
Even with lovely contemporary twists such as these, going to Çinili gives you the sense you are bathing in history. By the time I leave, blinking in the day, I’ve almost forgotten the world outside exists. This, to the Çinili team, is the goal: to give guests a respite from the rush of the modern world, even if it’s just for an hour.
“Nowadays, the pace of everything moves so quickly we tend to live in this constant fight or flight mode,” says De Coster. “What we hope we can offer the visitors is somewhere you can leave all your stress at the door, where you can take things slowly and allow yourself to be cared for. I think this is something that’s really missing in our daily life. We forget to attend to our bodies and our souls, and to simply slow down.”