Turkish bath

A picture from a traditional hamam. This one is for men. What else did you expect? :-)

Today, my mom and I went to a traditional Turkish bath or hamam (from Arabic) in a historic domed building, and soaked in the hot water, bathed and relaxed. Hope it will help my cold go away. As this hamam was still an old one and hasn't been "modernised" yet, it looks very nostalgic and is inexpensive. We only paid 7 YTL (€3,69) each for as long as we wanted to stay.

Hamams or steam baths exist in many places but in Turkey many of them have natural thermal water. In Bursa, most hamams get their hot water from thermal springs and are thus very healthy (the water is suitable for drinking and bathing). This is not astonishing as our "house mountain" — the Uludağ is a (hopefully) inactive volcano.

Talking about volcanoes, Turkey is a major earthquake zone. And tonight in the news I heard that there was an earthquake in Istanbul today. It was "only" a magnitude of 4.8. When I told my mom, she just said "Ah, yes, there was an earthquake here just now." Well, I knew this could happen anytime before I moved here :-( I will try to console myself with the positive side of it … hot, relaxing spas...

Here is a poem about Bursa's spas by the Ottoman poet Arif:

Those who enter remain
Bathing in the life giving water
Cures the ills of many
At Bursa’s spa.

Helmut von Moltke, a German  military teacher who was in Turkey in the 1830s, wrote in a letter to his father: “I have already told you of the pleasures of the Turkish hamams. In Bursa the water is not artificially heated, but is by nature so hot that at first one cannot believe that one will live to survive immersion in the large, clear pool without being scalded. There was a wonderful view from the terrace of the hamam which we entered and it was so comfortable that we were reluctant to leave.”