A Turkish hamam, in plain words

Warm, wet and made of stone

A hamam is easy to confuse with a sauna or a steam room, and it is neither. In a sauna the air is hot and dry; in a steam room it is thick with steam. A hamam is warm and wet, built of stone or marble, and the point of it is not the heat alone but what happens after the heat.

That is the kese — a thorough scrub from shoulders to feet — and the wash in soap foam. Those two steps are what make a hamam a hamam. Everything else — the warm marble, the basins of water, the peştemal wrap — is there to serve them.

An old habit on this coast

The hamam grew out of a long tradition of public bathing around the eastern Mediterranean, and it became part of everyday Ottoman life: a place to get clean, and a place to meet.

In Side you can see how far back the habit goes. The town's archaeological museum is housed in a restored bath building from the Roman period, with the cold, warm and hot rooms that Roman bathers moved between. The hamam you visit today is a different building — but it is the same idea: heat, water, and time set aside to look after yourself.

Four words you will hear

• Göbektaşı — the heated marble platform at the heart of a hamam, where you lie to warm up and where the scrub and the foam wash usually take place.
• Kurna — the marble basins along the walls, filled with water for rinsing.
• Peştemal — the traditional hamam wrap, worn over your swimwear.
• Kese — the coarse-textured mitt used for the scrub, and the name of the scrub itself.

A hamam visit in Side

Our Basic Hamam is the traditional hamam with a sauna and a steam room added before it and a short aromatic oil massage of about 20 minutes at the end. You are collected from your hotel and brought back to it; the transfer is part of the price. It costs €20 per adult, €10 for children aged 4 to 10, and nothing for children under 4.

The whole visit, door to door, takes about 2.5 to 3 hours. If you would like to know what happens at each step, read what happens in a Turkish bath, or go straight to the booking form.

Is it for everyone?

A hamam is warm and humid, and it is not recommended during pregnancy, with heart or circulatory conditions, or for anyone who does not cope well with heat or humidity. If you are under a doctor's care, or have high or low blood pressure, a skin condition, a recent operation or an injury, ask your doctor first and tell the hamam before your session.