Photo: Flickr, -RS-

When getting naked with strangers, it can be tough to gauge the precise etiquette. I usually err on the side of smiling and direct eye contact, which likely makes me appear a little too eager. I was thinking about this recently as I sat in a 400-year-old hammam in Istanbul, trying to have an authentic experience, pouring buckets of warm water over myself and wondering whether it was possible to get a rash from marble.

 

I was visiting the city for the first time with my boyfriend. (For the record, he was on the other side of the hammam, the men’s side, where he later told me that he did his best not to look.) In certain places, there are mandatory nods to history. The Western Wall is de rigeur in Jerusalem, and the Parthenon is a must in Athens. The Turks got in early on the whole thorough bathing thing, and so this was our little way of paying homage.

 

On a quiet side street not far from the Hagia Sofia, I walked down the stairs into the women’s side of the hammam, found a change room and started to take off my clothes. No English was being spoken — a distinct advantage when you’re in Turkey and trying to have an authentic experience, but a definite disadvantage when you’re naked and can’t figure out how to flush a 400-year-old toilet.

 

I stood around, guiltily for several minutes before the hammam matron showed up and barked me into the chamber of marble bathing rooms. Each room had varying heat and was rimmed with marble sinks, the taps on full, overflowing onto the floor. The domed ceilings had glass with coloured panes, which allowed in the fading mid-afternoon sun. I headed for the hottest room, which was empty, and sat on my towel, unsure of how to proceed.

 

The hammam matron soon found me and ordered me into the central room, where there were a number of Turkish women who, judging from their slight smirks, had already been alerted to my presence. I clambered up onto a large marble slab; the towel I was still clutching was yanked out of my hands. The matron disappeared for a moment and then reappeared wearing only her underpants and carrying a bucket and rag.

 

The experience of being washed by another person conjures up both romantic and luxurious imagery. Perhaps a fancy lace collar and devoted servant with a long-handled brush? A friend of mine once told me that the most romantic thing he ever did for his now ex-girlfriend involved a very hot Cyprus day and a tub full of cold water and cut lemons. And there is, of course, that celebrated scene from The English Patient.

 

I think I’m underestimating my capacity for hyperbole when I say that my experience of being bathed by a hammam matron was the opposite of all of that. For 20 minutes, I was roughly scrubbed and barked at, all the while trying my desperate best not to fall over the side of the increasingly soapy slab of marble. On top of this, I was repeatedly thwacked about the face and body by the matron’s great and pendulous, sopping wet breasts. She then washed my hair with some kind of two-in-one shampoo and ordered me to sit next to a sink and lash myself with buckets of warm water. I stopped after about 15 minutes, and the women sitting across from me shook their heads. Within seconds, the matron appeared and made her point: I was not yet clean enough.

 

And while all of this was happening, in the midst of being gawked at and treated sternly and undergoing some sort of water punishment surely approved by the U.S. military, I was becoming more and more cheerful. I’ve seen people accomplish nonchalance in these kinds of environments — and I’ve seen it because I’m always the one who’s looking. I can’t tear myself away from the exposure to genuine breasts and thighs and butts, so much more varied and familiar than the ubiquitously one-note images displayed. There was something so spectacularly relaxed and unselfconscious about these mass bathers, so casually naked, and I soon became one of them.

 

Eventually, a young woman sitting nearby held up a washcloth in my direction. The deal? I wash her back and she would wash mine. We had no common language, so we exchanged a lot of smiling and nodding. She let me use her sponge, which I thought was nice.