From Rome to Marrakech: A History of the Hammam

In 33 BC, Agrippa counted the baths of Rome and found a hundred and seventy of them. Eight years later he built one of his own — a domed hot-air sweating chamber — though it only worked properly once the Aqua Virgo aqueduct reached it in 19 BC. When he died in 12 BC he left the complex to the Roman people, endowed so that anyone could use it without paying.

The Roman bath was never one room. It was a route. A changing room, a cold room with a plunge pool, a warm room to acclimatise the body, a hot room built directly above the furnace, and often a dry sweating chamber past that. The floors sat raised on short pillars so furnace gases could travel underneath and rise through hollow walls — the hypocaust. Oil was worked into the skin and scraped off with a curved bronze blade.

Modern textbooks lay this out as a fixed order. Ancient practice was looser; the sequence varied by building and by bather. What was consistent was the function. The baths were where the city met itself — library, gymnasium, dinner, gossip and politics attached to the act of getting clean.

When the Umayyads took Byzantine territory in the seventh and eighth centuries, they inherited its buildings along with its land. The earliest Islamic baths in Syria, Jordan and Palestine are recognisably Roman in plan, and in some cases are literally Roman buildings adapted — at al-Bāra in Syria, pools were rebuilt into fountains and washbasins.

Then came the change everything else follows from: a water boiler set above the furnace, venting steam directly into the hot room. Rome's hot room was dry. The hammam's is wet.

Other Roman features fell away, but more slowly than the usual story allows. The gymnasium and running track went early — athletics never carried over. The cold plunge lasted: early Islamic hammams kept it, and it only disappears in the medieval period. And where Rome immersed, the hammam generally rinsed — water poured over the body rather than a body lowered into water. Generally, not always. Iranian hammams kept their pools.

Qusayr 'Amra, built in the Jordanian desert in the early eighth century, is still standing. Its hot-room dome carries a painted map of the night sky — among the earliest known attempts to put the heavens on a curved ceiling.

One caution, because it is repeated everywhere: the idea that hammams exist to serve ritual ablution is contested by historians, not settled. Early Maliki jurists were suspicious of bathhouses and argued against them; that opposition faded only around the ninth century. The buildings certainly came to be sited and used in relation to prayer. That is different from saying prayer produced them.

Hammam comes from the Arabic root ḥ-m-m, which carries the sense of heat. From Arabic it passed into Persian, and into Turkish as hamam. It entered English around 1625.

Which means the word does not belong to any single country on this list. It is the name the ritual kept while the ritual moved.

The Ottomans built more hammams than any power before or since, endowed as charitable foundations and usually attached to a mosque complex. They inherited Byzantine dome-building and used it: the hot room became a domed hall with small private cells radiating off it, laid out with a symmetry earlier hammams never had.

Two Ottoman additions stuck. The göbektaşı — the navel stone — a large heated marble platform at the centre of the hot room, where the body is laid out to sweat and be scrubbed. And the çifte hamam, the double bath: two complete mirrored halves, men's and women's, under one roof, instead of one set of rooms split by the clock.

In 1556 the architect Sinan built the Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamam for the wife of Süleyman the Magnificent, on the site of the Byzantine Baths of Zeuxippus — seventy-five metres long, two symmetrical halves on one axis. It reopened, restored, in 2011.

In 1768 Mustafa III ended new public bath construction by decree, and patronage moved to private baths in the houses along the Bosphorus.

In Morocco the hammam attached itself to the mosque. In Fez, most hammams sit beside a mosque and its minaret — washing and prayer arranged to serve one another. One of them, Hammam al-Mokhfiya, was held as part of the Qarawiyyin mosque's endowment. The bathhouse was, in the most literal sense, mosque property.

It also attached itself to water. Roman baths depended on monumental aqueducts; Moroccan hammams plugged into the medina's existing distribution networks, which in Fez go back to the eighth century, drawing on a nearby well or spring.

The rooms kept Rome's order and took Arabic names: al-barrani, the outer room; al-wasti, the middle; al-dakhli, the inner and hottest. Cold, warm, hot, in a line. The furnace still runs beneath the floor, and it still burns whatever is to hand — carpenters' offcuts, and olive pits.

Light comes from above. The vaults are pierced with round openings eighteen to twenty centimetres across, set in rows of eight and once capped with blown glass bells. They are called qamariyyat — little moons — or shamsiyyat, little suns.

Under the Almohads, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Fez had ninety-three hammams. It has roughly a hundred and twenty today, thirty of them historic buildings inside the medina. The oldest securely dated bath in Morocco is in neither Fez nor Marrakech: it is at Walīla — Volubilis — built in the late eighth or ninth century, a generation after Idris arrived there around 788.

Somewhere near the tenth century, separate provision for women becomes visible in the record. In cities with very few public rooms open to them, the hammam was one — and it still runs on a gendered clock, the same building serving men and women in shifts where there is only one of them.

It is also, quietly, the efficient option. Researchers measuring Moroccan household water use found that people use three to four times more water washing at home than they do in the hammam.

Béldi is not a poetic word. It comes from balad — country, town — and means something close to of this place. Local. Native. Not imported and not improved. Savon beldi is country soap.

What is actually documented about it is thinner than the marketing suggests. Nineteenth-century French surveys of Algeria record village soap made from olive oil pressed communally and alkali gathered locally as plant ash, sold by weight out of barrels, in browns and blacks and the occasional yellow. That is a record of the practice as it stood in the 1840s. It is not a birth certificate, and it is Algerian.

The same goes for the kessa, the woven glove used to lift the softened skin after the soap. Its use is attested in nineteenth-century Maghrebi accounts and its Turkish twin, the kese, is older still in practice — but there is no serious published history of the object, and claims about its original material or century are invention.

So: nobody knows when the first pot of black soap was made, and anyone who gives you a date is guessing. We would rather say that than make one up.

The phrase is Victorian, commercial, and slightly wrong. David Urquhart, a Scottish diplomat, encountered hammams in the Ottoman empire in the 1830s and wrote about them. Richard Barter, an Irish physician, read him in 1856 and set out to build one — sending his architect to Rome first. Manchester opened one around July 1857, Barter's opened at St Ann's in May 1858, and the first public commercial bath opened in Cork in March 1859.

What they built ran on hot dry air. The hammam runs on steam. Some of Barter's contemporaries argued the thing should be called a Roman bath instead, which was the more accurate name. They lost to the more exotic one.

Not a country, and not a costume. An order of operations: heat, then cleanse, then exfoliate, then purify, then oil. Rome would recognise four of the five.

Morocco is where all five are still performed in one room, in one sitting, by people who go every week rather than once on holiday. That is the version BÉLDI is built from — and the reason the house is Moroccan even when the story is Mediterranean.