Hamam

BalkanTravellers.com   

The Turkish bath – the historical institution, in which people wash, relax and chat – is, at first sight, a harmless phenomenon. Paradoxically, however, it has created an entire rift of cultural differences between Western Europe and the Balkans.

For people from the peninsula, the Turkish bath is most often a curse. Telling someone you wish he would end up in the Turkish bath means wishing him a death that is simultaneously violent, painful and humiliating. The expression, in a way, gives rise to all kinds of associations that come to mind with the prison scenes from the cult film “Orient Express.”

Quite the opposite, in Western Europe the Turkish bath symbolises daring, mysterious pleasures, with a faint hint of erotica – a beautiful, oriental version of European spa therapy.

It seems like one of them is seriously confused. Is it the Balkans’ inhabitants, with their historical prejudices, or the Western Europeans, with their made-up reality?

Actually, the explanation is not so dramatic: if the inhabitants of the Balkans get their perception of the hamams from their past as a lower-tier people in the Ottoman Empire, the West Europeans know the baths from the writing of the rich and free vagabonds, with their tendency to romanticise, who crossed Europe, their imagination set ablaze by the splendid decadence of the Sublime Porte. Or from films and musicals, such as “Harem,” which romanticise and poeticise the history and habits of the East in a Hollywood-kind of way.