Cagaloglu Hamami

This guide to Cagaloglu Hamami in Istanbul explains why an eighteenth-century sultan built a public bathhouse to fund a library inside Hagia Sophia, and follows the two architects, Suleyman Aga and Abdullah Aga, who shaped its domed chambers and marble basins in the Ottoman Baroque style. It traces the hammam's draw for visitors far beyond the Ottoman world, including Florence Nightingale and European royalty, and the ritual around the heated stone slab at its center that has barely changed in three centuries. Take a moment at the gobektasi before you move on.