Süleymaniye Hamam, turkish bath in Istanbul. The ultimate pleasure of the senses.

Last visit : June 2025

Gender : It is one of the few hamams in Istanbul where couples are allowed.

My rating : MUST DO

Duration : 90 minutes (100 minutes from arrival to exit)

Price : 85 euros per person

Web : https://www.suleymaniyehamami.com.tr/

Falling asleep in the car while your dad is driving and waking up in your own bed.

Drinking an ice cold beer after walking all day in the hot sun.

Eating a fresh sausage spread on a slice of Tuscan bread while watching the sun set over Siena.

Giving the wrong directions to a tourist you recognized as your old math teacher.

Finding a 100 euro note in a pair of trousers that had not been used for a long time.

Cancel an appointment at the last minute and instantly feel five years younger.

Take off your boots after a day of skiing and put on a pair of comfortable and warm sneakers.

Hearing the sound of rain on the roof while you're in bed, warm, and have nothing to do.

Learning that the coworker you hate with all your heart is moving in a week.

Sitting in your armchair with a bag of new books, leafing through them, burying your nose in them, intoxicated by the smell of paper and glue.

Pretending not to see an acquaintance on the street. And then realizing that he did the same. Symmetry, brotherhood, civility.

Singing at the top of your lungs a song you've heard 1000 times while alone in the car.

Leaving an open can of herring, well hidden, on top of a hotel cupboard where you were treated like dirt.

And I'm limiting myself to things that can be done without taking off your pants.

I can't say exactly where, but taking a turkish bath at Istanbul's Süleymaniye Hamam ranks right up there, high up among life's great pleasures. Süleymaniye Hamam is not just a Turkish bath. It is an oriental delirium. It is an ecstasy of flesh and heat.

As soon as you cross the threshold of the entrance, in the heart of the most imperial Istanbul, you are welcomed with that courtesy that only a people who have spent centuries building empires and bathing in golden domes can bestow with the naturalness of someone who serves you a mint tea while calling you "pasha".

After ringing a relatively anonymous doorbell, a pretty girl welcomes you and leads you into the enveloping hall of the hamam, where everything, from the sofas to the carpets, evokes the oriental wellness experience you expect when you enter a hamam in Istanbul. Looking into the eyes of the staff who welcome you with a helpful manner, you understand that they know what they have to do, that inside you are a dehydrated eggplant. And they are there to fry you in the holy oil of wellness.

The Private Changing Room: The Relaxation Orgy Begins in Istanbul's turkish bath

The experience begins by leaving your shoes at the entrance. Then you go up a steep staircase apparently designed to select the clientele: the less agile immediately to orthopedics, the more able admitted to supreme well-being.

You are assigned a private room where you are given a key, a pestemal (the cloth that wraps you with more dignity than you have ever had in your life) and the chance to slough off every vestige of modern civilization. All your worldly possessions will remain safely inside for the duration of the bath, where you will carry only your flaccid limbs and the key to your changing room.

Phase one: warming up in the calidarium – the antechamber to paradise

Having descended the hostile staircase from the changing rooms to the hall without incident, one is invited to face the second test: to wear small wooden clogs, rather painful, but above all designed to be completely unsuitable for walking on wet wooden floors. Only those who also pass this test can finally access the rite.

Entering the warm room is like being welcomed into the warm and slightly humid embrace of Allah himself. The white marble envelops you, the light filters through small circular windows like stars in a stone sky, and your body begins to sweat out all the sins committed since you consumed the first kebab of your life.

The space is, I would say, octagonal (the mind almost immediately abandons itself to oblivion and is not inclined to geometric speculations, so I cannot guarantee the octagonality or hexagonality of the structure); on each side extend other small rooms reserved for ablutions (it seems to me that there are four rooms, but at this point my mind is not so inclined even to the elementary calculation but I would swear that the rooms were more than two and less than fifteen); the gaze wanders caressing the marbles, the bricks, the essential lines of this room that has crossed history. You look around and try to imagine the great Suleiman, in these same rooms, sitting exactly where your buttocks now lie, intent on regenerating his limbs while planning the invasion of Vienna.

You sit on the marble, startled as it feels unexpectedly warm, even soft; you close your eyes, and time collapses.

The first phase lasts half an hour, but it is a dilated time, of total relaxation; the temperature is high, but not suffocating and yes, you could stay there for a long time, while the tellak , the masseurs, take care of the guests who precede you in the side rooms.

Phase Two: The Washing – or the Resurrection by the Soapman

Then finally comes the moment of ultimate pleasure. The previous guests are escorted to the exit and new tellaks take over to devote themselves to you.

You are made to sit on the floor, next to a sink from which water flows incessantly; the tellak fills a basin with it and pours it vigorously over you; you hesitate for a moment, fearing that the water is too cold, but the temperature is perfect, warm, but not boiling, nor lukewarm; exactly what is needed after an hour in the calidarium. The treatment is repeated several times and has the effect of a vigorous massage.

Just when you are getting into the frame of mind where you would be willing to overlook even those who try to pass you by in the line at the post office, the scrub begins. The tellak , with expert hands, invites you to stretch out first one limb, then the other and with a rough glove frees your dermis from every real or virtual iniquity. The massage goes on for a few minutes and you would like to ask for an extension, when you move on to the next practice: the sprinkling of foam.

At the tellak's invitation, you lie down on a warm slab (actually a bed, but made of marble); the tellak immerses a large sack (linen? Even my textile selectivity falters at this point) in a tub of soapy water and by rapidly sliding it inside the closed palm of the hand generates a vaporous cloud of foam that, after several passes, covers you completely. It is like being immersed in waterfalls of mermaid's milk, storms of whiteness. However light and impalpable this cloud seems to have its own tenuous gravity, or perhaps it is the foam that, dissolving little by little, transmits heat through the skin, but after the vigorous massage of the buckets of water it now seems like being massaged by fairy fingers.

And while you are there, immersed in an oily and sparkling oblivion, the real massage begins; but this time the ones massaging you are the fingers of a fairy but a muezzin on steroids. Every inch of your body is worked, modeled, crumpled, polished, redeemed. The vertebrae realign, the knees rejuvenate, the adipocytes mold into new and unprecedented forms.

After the massage, you return to the starting point, sitting on the floor beside the sink. The tellak pours buckets of water as if he wanted to erase your childhood traumas. And he succeeds. You feel light, pure, almost ready to live a new life under a new constitution. Every jet is a blessing. Every drop, a haiku of freshness. You get up with the sensation of levitating.

Phase three: the tepidarium

Once you have reached ecstasy, unfortunately it is time to wake up. You limp along on unsuitable clogs the short stretch of damp marble that leads to the tepidarium where, expertly dressed in pestemal, you sit for another half hour sipping a drink of your choice and reflecting on how fleeting pleasure is.

Conclusion: Suleiman, take me with you

The Süleymaniye Hamam is a Turkish bath designed in 1557 by Mimar Sinan for his sultan, and yes, for you, a mere Westerner accustomed to 3-minute showers and alcohol-free deodorant. It is the ultimate sensory experience. It is where the body meets poetry. Where the soul rinses off its conscience and flakes of dead skin.

If God has a day spa, this is probably it.