Çemberlitaş Hammam has been heating the same marble since 1584, and takes its name from the scorched, iron-hooped Roman column standing just outside — çemberli taş, the hooped stone. The great Ottoman architect Sinan raised the bath for Nurbanu Sultan — wife of one sultan and mother of the next — who endowed its steam and water to fund her charities. It was built as a çifte hamam, twin baths for men and women running in parallel under separate domes. When the Divan Yolu road was widened in the nineteenth century, part of the women's wing was shaved away, and the two halves no longer mirror each other.
You undress in a tall domed hall, then step into the hot room, where a ring of marble columns surrounds a broad heated slab called the göbektaşı. Overhead, sunlight falls through small star- and hexagon-shaped holes in the dome, thin blades of light drifting across the steam. You lie on the warm stone, are scrubbed and lathered, then rinsed from marble basins along the walls. It still works much as it did four centuries ago — a bath, not a museum — and the sounds are water, low voices, and the slap of a foamed cloth.