Turkish bath
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A Turkish bath is a method of cleansing the body and relaxation that was particularly popular during the Victorian era. The process involved in taking a Turkish bath is similar to that of a sauna, but is more closely related to the bathing practices of the Romans.
Taking a Turkish bath firstly involves relaxing in a room (known as the warm room) that is heated by a continuous flow of hot dry air allowing the bather to perspire freely. Bathers may then move to an ever hotter room (known as the hot room) before plunging themselves into a cold pool. After performing a full body wash and receiving a massage, bathers finally retire to the cooling-room for a period of relaxation.
History
Turkish baths were introduced to the British Isles by David Urquhart, diplomat and sometime Member of Parliament for Stafford, who for political and personal reasons wished to popularise Turkish culture. In 1850 he had written The Pillars of Hercules, a book about his travels in Spain and Morocco in 1848, in which he described the system of dry hot-air baths which had been in use there, and in the Ottoman Empire, very little changed from those which had been so popular in Roman times.
In 1856, Richard Barter, having read Urquhart's book and worked on the construction of a bath with him, opened the first modern Turkish bath in Britain at St Ann's Hydropathic Establishment near Blarney, County Cork, Ireland. The following year, the first Turkish bath to be built in England since Roman times was opened in Manchester, and the idea spread rapidly through the north of England. It reached London in July 1860 when Roger Evans, a member of one of Urquhart's Foreign Affairs Committees, opened a Turkish bath at 5 Bell Street, near Marble Arch.
During the following 150 years, well over 600 baths opened in Britain, while similar Turkish baths opened in cities in other parts of the then British Empire. Dr John Le Gay Brereton, who had given medical advice to bathers in a Foreign Affairs Committee-owned Turkish bath in Bradford, travelled to Sydney, Australia, and opened a Turkish bath there in Spring Street in 1859, even before the bath had reached London. Canada had one by 1869, and the first one in New Zealand was opened in 1874. Urquhart's influence was felt even outside the Empire when, in 1863, Dr Charles Shepard opened the first Turkish bath in the United States at 63 Columbia Street, Brooklyn Heights, New York.
Today there are just over twenty Turkish baths remaining open in the British Isles, although hot-air baths still thrive in the form of Russian steam baths and the Finnish sauna.