By Maïr

The Hammam, or Turkish Bath is a totally maternal experience.
The Cagaloglu Hammam, a 300 year old structure, is a complex yet harmonious marble bulb filled with pure white steam. It is obviously impossible to take pictures inside, so this post card will have to make do.
15,000,000 Turkish Pounds, about $30 U.S. will make a new Sultan out of you.
You are placed in the arms of a professional masseur and become his infant child for the space of an hour. The whole thing is kind of frightening until you learn to relax.
Then you are massed, scrubbed, massaged again, every joint in your body is twisted and cracked, soaped down, shampooed, rinsed. Then the fellow walks on your back, blocks your legs grabs your arms and pulls. Hard. This then is the meaning of vertebrae!
Once all that is over you can hang around and collect steam for as long as you'd like. Just lying there is an imposing experience, listening to the water dripping off the ancient vaulted ceiling and enjoying the feel of the immaculate marble under your back.
When you finally decide that you've had enough and leave the steam room, you are immediately dried off with fresh towels and are free to go back to your cubicle and lie down or to into the common area and sit near the fountain to enjoy a cup of Turkish tea while reading the Turkish Times.
They say in the books that once you've been to a Hamman, you know the meaning of the word 'clean'. In days of old, the women's section (into which I was not allowed, tragically) used to be a Mikveh for the Jewish community.
And so we emerged, Marie-Do from the ladies' and I from the gents' with softer skin than either of us could ever have imagined. We were so relaxed that we had to retire back to the hotel. Nothing else would do.

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By Marie-Do

The experience for women was gentler, and it is true that you feel all your barriers following one after the other until you feel like a babe in it's mothers arms.
The place itself was magnificent and mysterious; on top of the central vault full of star-shaped windows were other, smaller vaults, held up by sculpted pillars eaten away by humidity.
Glass lanterns shone gently from the ceiling. The massage took place on the ground of the central marble platform and the marble is so smooth that the body slips on it when the hands of the masseuse are powerful!
The masseuse knows perfectly well how to find the tension spots, paying a lot of attention to the belly, massaging the head while washing your hair... Each woman sits near a stone sink with copper taps.
With a large cup she waters you down generously, which is a totally different feeling than an aggressive shower spray.
Your head, neck, stomach, legs ... for hours ...
The heat is perfect and going through the space between the stone sinks and the center becomes perfectly natural.
The Hammam is the art of making you feel that you have a body and this is pure pleasure.