It has been truly said of the Turks, that “they hold impurity of the body in greater detestation than impurity of the mind.” This feeling the precepts of the Koran have caused or increased. They make frequent ablution so essential, that “without it prayer will be of no value in the eyes of God.” There is no point, therefore, of religious discipline, for which the directions are so minute, or so often repeated. Two modes are prescribed. The goul, which requires the ablution of the whole body, and the hodÛ, which confines it to the head and arms as high as the elbow; and where water cannot be procured in the desert, the ceremony must be performed by sand or dust, as its symbol. These ablutions are enjoined to all at stated times, but besides there are occasional circumstances which render them essential. The law enumerates eleven occurrences after which the person must wash, some of which are exceedingly curious, but not fit for the public eye. So important is this practice deemed, that it forms an item in every marriage-contract. The husband engages to allow his wife bath-money, as we do pin-money; and if it be withheld, she has only to go before the cadi, and turn her slipper upside down. If the complaint be not then redressed, it is a ground of divorce.

The first objects which strike a stranger on entering a Turkish city are the mosques, and the next certain edifices, roofed like them with domes, contiguous to each other. These domes are perforated by a number of apertures, which are closed by hemispheres of glass, resembling the globes by which our streets were lighted, inverted on the roof. These edifices are the public hummums,8 or baths, and the globes the means by which the light is admitted. There is no town in the Turkish empire so obscure, or so destitute of other comforts, that is not provided with a public bath, which is open from four o’clock in the morning until eight in the evening. The bather enters a saloon, in the midst of which is a fountain, where the linen of the establishment is usually washed; round this is a divan, covered with mats or cushions, on which he sits smoking till the hummumgee, or master of the bath, directs him to undress. His clothes are carefully deposited in a shawl tied up in the corners, and remain on his seat till his return. The tellah, or bathing attendant, now approaches, with two aprons and a napkin: the first he ties round his waist, and the latter round his head. He is then led into another saloon, more heated than the first; but the heat is so regulated that he feels no difference, though divested of his clothes; and when the body is thus prepared by this gradual increase of temperature, he is led into a third, when the business of the bath commences. This, in some baths, is very fine, supported on columns, and lined with marble.

The marble flooring is so hot, that he is now obliged to mount on wooden pattens, as his bare feet could not endure to come in contact with it. A dense vapour sometimes so fills this saloon, that he sees nothing distinctly, but figures flit before him, like visions in a mist. At the sides are ornamented fountains, whence issue pipes of hot and cold water, which he mixes to his fancy, and bedews his person with it from a large copper or iron spoon provided for the purpose. Having walked or sat in this heated mist till a profuse perspiration bursts out, the tellah again approaches, and commences his operations. He lays the bather on his back or face, and pins him to the ground by kneeling heavily on him; and having thus secured him, he handles him in the rudest and most painful manner: he twists and turns the limbs, so as to seem to dislocate every joint. The sufferer feels as if the very spine was separated, and the vertebrÆ of the back torn asunder. It is in vain he complains of this treatment, screams out in anguish and apprehension, and struggles to extricate himself. The incubus sits grinning upon him, and torturing him till he becomes passive from very exhaustion. When this horrid operation is over, the tormentor offers to shave him; and if he make no resistance, he leaves but one small lock of hair on the crown, by which the angel of death is to draw him from his winding-sheet. It is remarkable, that while the bather is burning with heat, the flesh of this fiend, though exposed to the same temperature, is as cold and chilling as monumental marble. A second tellah now attends, and uses him more gently than the first: he envelopes his hands in gloves, or little bags of camlet, and, by a gentle and dexterous pressure of the surface, he expresses, as it were, all the deposit of insensible perspiration: it is surprising what a quantity he peels from the surface of the skin, of this inspissated fluid, resembling in colour and consistence rolls or flakes of dough.

When this substance ceases to exude, the operator rubs him with scented soap, and drenches him almost to suffocation with deluges of hot water. After this thorough ablution, he wipes him perfectly dry with soft, warm, perfumed towels, and leads him to a divan, on which he reposes some time,—still in a state of nudity, with the exception of a shawl thrown over him. Here refreshments are brought, and partaken of with an extraordinary increase of appetite; after which he rises and dresses, perfectly refreshed. Before he goes forth, a looking-glass set in mother-of-pearl is brought, to adjust his cravat, on the glass of which he deposits the price of his bath. It was originally settled at four aspers, which according to the present currency would be about one-third of a farthing, and it still continues nearly the same in the small towns and villages. In the capital, however, it is increased, in the more sumptuous baths, to fifty paras, or four pence.

Where warm-springs are found, they are immediately diverted into reservoirs, and edifices erected over them. Those of Kaplizza, near Brusa, already mentioned, are perhaps the finest in the world. In the centre saloon, under a noble dome, supported by marble pillars, is a basin of fifteen yards in circumference, also of polished marble, and five feet deep, filled with hot and limpid water. At its source, whence it first issues into day, it is at a boiling heat, and blisters the finger that incautiously feels it. In the baths, however, the heat is reduced to a tolerable temperature-in summer to 102°, and in winter to 90°. The process of bathing, substituting water for steam, is the same as that described. The salutary effects of it are highly extolled, and perhaps with reason-opening the pores, and emulging, as the hakims say, the perspiratory glands; but strangers who first submit to the rude and suffocating process, complain that it is as debilitating as it is painful, under the coarse and awkward manipulation of such an operator; and to natives who constantly use it, it is one of the enervating causes which is justly supposed to exhaust the strength and prostrate the energies of a modern Turk.

The mysteries of a female bath, it is not permitted to see, no more than those of Eleusis: all that could be known, Lady Mary Wortley Montague has told a century ago. Their bath is the great coffee-house, where they assemble, and enjoy a freedom they can nowhere else indulge. If a stranger enter this sacred place by mistake, even his mistake is punished with death. Not long since a Frank stumbled into one, supposing it to be for his own sex; he was instantly seized, and dragged before the cadi. On his way, some friendly passenger suggested to him to feign madness, as his only chance of escape: he took the hint, and did so with such success, that the cadi, instead of ordering him to execution, dismissed him with that tenderness and respect the Turks show to the foolish or insane, whom they fancy to be chosen vessels inspired by Allah with a better gift than reason. Another Frank, presuming on the impunity thus acquired, entered a female bath by design. He was seized; but not counterfeiting insanity with such success, he was suspected-and disappearing soon after, was supposed to have been strangled.