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The Hamam in Bulgurlu was a smaller one compared to the ones in Galatasaray and Kocamustafapaşa. I remember the owner of this Hamam was an old Armenian Madam(1). From the front door of the Hamam you would enter into a courtyard called Camekan with marble floors and wooden  stairs on both sides of the foyer.  The stairs led you into a lofted area surrounded with several dressing rooms that had glass doors. Once you undressed in these rooms you would wrap the peştemal(2) around your waist, put the takunya (3)on your feet and go downstairs to hand your wallet and valuables to the Madam for safe keep. From here you would go behind the glass doors to inside of the hamam to an area called soğukluk(4). The soğukluk was a relatively cooler transit area designed to adjust your body to the temperature change in the inside of the Hamam, where the temperature was very hot and the rooms full of steam. The soğukluk had a narrow wooden door leading to the the steam room of the hamam called hararet. As soon as you entered from the door the hot air, steam and humidity would hit your face, slowing down your breathing. In the middle of the big room covered in marble from floors to the ceiling there sat a circlular shaped marble pedestal called the Göbektaşı(5) which was heated from underneath. Guests using the bath would lie on the Göbektaşı for few minutes to soften  and activate their skins, while looking at the ornate ceiling design and watching the rays of sunlight beaming down and reflecting hundreds of fragments from star shaped windows on the dome shaped ceiling. The circular shaped room with the göbektaşı in the center had several  marble water basins called kurna(6)surrounding the perimeter walls. All of these kurnas were decorated with raised reliefs of flower motives and housed copper hot and cold water faucets and contained silver capped water cups called hamam tası(7) Once you laid down here for few minutes, you would go and pick a kurna and start pouring down the water with a hamam tası over your head. If you wanted to get your body rubbed with a kese(8) you would ask the keseci (kese man) to perform this for a small fee. Since back in those years shampoo and specialty soaps did not exist you would use a bar of  “Hacı Şakir or Puro” soap to cleanse your body.

When I was a young child I had the opportunity to live in several districts of Istanbul in my grandmother's, uncle's and aunt's homes. In my uncle’s wooden house in Bulgurlu, a neighborhood of Üskudar on the Asian side, where I spent several summers as a very young teenager in the early sixties, there was no running water in the house. We would often go the neighborhood çeşme and bring water in plastic tanks to  the house with my cousin Bülent. The drinking water was obtained the same way on a weekly basis from a spring sebil several steps under the ground level at the village square. And of course we  frequently visited  the Bulgurlu Hamam which I had described in detail above.

On the other hand when I was much younger at the age of five or six, the circumstances were a little different at the three story wooden kiosk of my grandmother in the Kocamustafapasa district in the Historic Peninsula of the European side of Istanbul. There was running water in the house, which my grandmother called “terkos”,  named after the lake the water was pumped from. There were five big storage tanks dug into the ground in the garden to accumulate rain water to be used to water plants and vegetables in the garden and to clean floors in the house. There was a big clay drinking water storage jug  in the kitchen, the water being supplied by the "sucu",the water man from his horse carriage on a weekly basis. An unusual amenity in the early 1950 ies for most homes in Istanbul, a small refrigerator which my grandmother called frijder(Frigidaire)to keep the water cool in bottles was also placed in the kitchen. And finally a private hamam adjourning the kitchen with a wood stove to heat water and a kurna with water faucets.

Once in a while my grandmother would still take me to the public hamam in Kocamustafapaşa.While men often socialized in coffee houses , the hamam was a perfect place for women to get together. Most hamams were open for women only during day time and to men in the evening .Women would often prepare food as if they were going to a picnic: dolmas, köftes, fruits etc., chat, gossip and eat  in the intermediary "soğukluk" area of the hamam. Since most marriages were arranged marriages at that time the hamam was a perfect place to check out a future bride for the sons of the women. It was not unusual for boys to go to hamam with their mothers or other women in the family until they were five or six years old. But if a woman brought her son to the hamam at any older age than that, other women would often joke : ‘’ Hanım*, Hanım, next time may be you should bring your husband !”

It has been over forty some years since I went to a hamam for a bath and I don’t know when I will go next. But on my recent trip to Istanbul, when I was walking in the historical peninsula I realized from the steam and humidity coming out from an old building that I was in front of the famous Cağaloğlu Hamam. This wasn’t planned but I did not hesitate for a second to go into this very historic bath and at least to take some pictures in the areas which were open to tourists.

*Hanım=lady