Istanbul - pt. 6

I spent Saturday doing two of the things I'd gone to Istanbul to do: visit Topkapi Palace and the Harem, and have a Turkish bath at the hamam built for Nurubanu (wife of Sultan Selim II and mother of Murat III) in 1584 by the famous architect Sinan, who designed many of the city's mosques (his protege designed the Blue Mosque).

You may be wondering why these two things were so high on my list of reasons to visit Istanbul. When I was a teenager, my grandmother gave me a set of romance novels written by Bertrice Small - the saga of the O'Malley women, Irish and English descendants of an Irish shipping clan set in Elizabethan England. Each of the heroines of the novels takes her turn trapped as the property of some Arabic, African, or Asian man. One of the women, and subsequently her daughter, end up in harems of Ottoman Turks, and Sultan Selim and Nurubanu are featured in the stories, as are sights around Istanbul. The novels were fiction, but they made a huge impression on me (many of my kinks and the things I find hot today were introduced to me in these books). It was pretty amazing to be able to wander around places that had previously existed only in fantasy for me.

Topkapi is huge, set just behind Aya Sofya, looking with birds-eye views of much of Istanbul. You can peer out over the Marmara, the Bosphorus, and the Golden Horn. Useful for defense against foreign invaders.

Technically, the Harem is just the Sultan's living quarters. There are places for concubines, places for each of the four wives, and the Valide Sultan (mother of the Sultan), the most powerful woman in the empire, lives in the center, separating the concubines and wives from the Sultan. There are quarters for the Eunuchs who cared for the women. The women at a long bar just outside their dormitory. There is a hallway called the Hall of Golden Coins, because the favorites would be lined up along the wall and the Sultan would walk through and toss coins at their feet. One of the posts for the women to stand on had a hook in the floor. I wonder if it was customary that the Sultan had a favorite who wasn't exactly happy with her position? Because in the books I read, the heroines got to be favorites by presenting such a challenge the men felt that had to "break" them.

Shhhhhh!. Let me have the fantasy. :P

I certainly couldn't help but think, in certain parts like the Sultan's bath (which, by the way, had hot and cold running water, and the tiles heated from beneath), and private chambers, that there had been a number of slave girls forced to submit to powerful men in those rooms.

The rest of the palace was awesome, too, particularly the treasury (holy crap, jewels!), and the room in which they showcase some of the Sultan's clothes. Fuck, were those guys huge! You know in the miniatures they show of Ottoman life, in which the Sultan always looks twice as large as the rest of the people? Well, they weren't just flattering him and making him larger than life because he was Sultan. Those men were huge. It makes sense, given all the sons each Sultan had, and the fact that the first son was not automatically Sultan upon the father's death - it took the biggest, mightiest of them to concur and subdue the others (or the one with the most conniving mother).

After Topkapi, I sat in Sultanahmet Square for maybe 20 minutes, just taking in everything I'd seen. A Muslim woman sat next to me on the bench. One of the Man Hos approached me, he'd tried several times before, but I guess now that I was seated he felt he had a better chance. The old Muslim lady next to me was not amused. She made hissing sounds at him, and shooed him away and said something to him in Turkish, and he walked off. Heh.

When I was ready, I walked to Cemberlitas Hamam.

I ordered a bath with shampoo and massage for 18 euros, about $25. After paying, I was sent into a long corridor with lockers, and given a towel and a locker and a pair of rubber slippers. I stripped down to my panties and wrapped the towel around me before heading into the room for the bath. I was planning on going totally nude, but it seemed like other people around me were leaving their panties on, so I didn't want to offend. But when I opened the door, I saw several of the women in there with no panties, so turned around and put mine in the locker.

When you walk into the steam room, it's like a sauna. But hotter, and made of stone and marble, with a large round marble slab in the center, with women lying around the outside in different stages of being bathed. The room is round, and the ceiling is domed, with holes peaking through to let the light of the sun in. The light is soft and steamy. Instantly, you start to sweat. Laying on your towel on the slab, soon the towel beneath you is soaked.

Eventually, the girl to bathe you comes over. She is wearing panties. She tells you to turn onto your back (unless you already are) and starts scrubbing your skin with a camel hair cloth that removes not only dirt, but dead layers of skin. She does your whole body, turning you onto your stomach to get your backside, too. Then you are doused with lukewarm water. From there, she begins soaping up your body, smoothing and massaging the suds into your skin, manipulating your limbs and body as you lay limp from the heat and decadence. She rinses you, and soaps you up again, paying more attention to the massage aspect the second time. Your arms, shoulders, calves, feet, back.

After rinsing you again, she takes you off to the side near the basins with running water, and washes your hair for you. When she is done, you go back to laying on the slab, for as long as you want to. There is no time limit. You get all sweaty again, but it hardly matters given how clean you are. It just feels nice, and cleansing.

I think the whole thing lasted for me for about an hour. It's hard to say. The experience was one of full body hedonism. Pleasurable, but not exactly sexual. It easily could be though, under different circumstances. I felt light and floaty almost the minute I walked into the bath. That feeling lasted for hours after I left.

I'm not sure I can express how amazing this experience was. I wish we had something like this in the US, the full experience, and as cheap. It was one of the few times in life where you have the fantasy of something, and when it happens, the experience is everything you imagined, and more. For me, that usually involves sex.

I will definitely go to Istanbul again, and the hamam visit is going to be a tradition.