Descripción de las clases de diseño

European travelers were impressed by the level of cleanliness the Ottomans regularly observed, both with regard to their own bodies

and to the environment where they lived. Pierre Belon, a sixteenth-century French botanist and naturalist, crowned the Ottomans as “the cleanest people in the world.” He was especially admiring of the way babies and infants were kept clean, and were not as smelly as Euro-pean children were. Another sixteenth-century traveler to the Ottoman Empire, Guillaume Postel, a member of the Collège de France who arrived at Istanbul in 1535 to acquire oriental manuscripts for Fran-çois I, wished that all the great cities of Europe had similar habits.³⁹ People removed their shoes before entering a house (or a mosque).

Animals, such as dogs and birds, were considered to be unclean, and therefore were not allowed to enter private houses (although stray animals were taken care of).⁴⁰ The impression of European observers was that many Ottomans were punctilious about cleaning themselves after any unclean action, such as sexual intercourse or bowel move-ments, and did not merely purify themselves directly before prayer (all Muslims must be in a state of ritual purity—not the same thing as physically clean—before prayer).⁴¹

Water was used not only for general hygiene but also as a direct therapeutic tool. Medical qualities were attributed to both natural and artifi cial reservoirs of water, whether on the surface or subterranean.

Bathing in different types of water sources was the subject of many illustrations in Ottoman illuminated manuscripts, such as the minia-tures from a sixteenth-century work shown in fi gures 2 and 3.

These miniatures raise questions pertaining to privacy, such as where the boundaries between the private and the public domains in early modern Ottoman society were drawn, and how an Ottoman was supposed to behave in the public domain while doing something that is ostensibly intimate and private (here: bathing, being partially/fully naked). Privacy is man’s right and need to be undisturbed, to have an emotional and physical sphere immune from public intrusion (or at least with restricted access to it). People who live in proximity have to adopt a set of guidelines to sustain the consent for this arrangement.

The way a human group defi nes “privacy” is part of their specifi c lifestyle.⁴² Privacy is a socially and culturally embedded phenomenon.

The concept has evolved and changed from place to place, from time to time, and from certain social and economic circumstances to others.

The Oxford English Dictionary includes references to uses of the term that go back to the middle of the fi fteenth century, but not earlier, and the bulk of citations is from later periods.⁴³ What did the notion of “privacy” mean for Ottomans in the early modern period and what was its relative importance in the face of competing and contradictory legal, social, and cultural norms?

Figure 2. Three men standing on a roof planning to jump into water; the water is clean and medically benefi cial. “Wonders of Art and Nature,” manuscript held at the British Library, Harl. 5500, 124v. Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

Figure 3. Four men are bathing in the river while three more sit on the bank.

The river runs from the mountains, and its clean water is washing away dirt and sickness. “Wonders of Art and Nature,” manuscript held at the British Library, Harl. 5500, 160r. Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

The Middle Eastern contexts of privacy have been studied so far by only a few scholars, starting in the late 1980s, who considered mainly the domicile and the neighborhood contexts of privacy. The fi rst was Abraham Marcus, who studied eighteenth-century Aleppo, a crowded city by contemporary standards. Marcus discussed privacy within the context of social order and analyzed it as comprising two aspects: the physical privacy of the individual body; and personal privacy, or privacy of information, meaning the prohibition against interfering in the intimate affairs of another person. He concluded that it was mostly physical privacy that mattered, while neighborhood familiarity was taken for granted. Marcus argued that, although the urban poor maintained their own form of privacy due to fi nancial constraints, the ideals of privacy and morality were those upheld and dominated by the elite.⁴⁴

Shortly afterward Janet Abu-Lughod pointed out the intimate relationships taking place in a city alley. She continued the theme of privacy defi ned and maintained in different manners according to social class. Abu-Lughod deviated from Marcus in regarding the lower strata as creative and active cultural agents, promoting a cul-ture of their own, rather than regarding them as merely responding to upper-class ideals. She demonstrated that the lower social strata regarded the public alley as a semiprivate sphere, as they could not maintain seclusion in their own domiciles like the upper class. This was one component in her refutation of the frozen model of “the Islamic City” as a chaotic entity.⁴⁵

Dror Ze’evi, who studied seventeenth-century Jerusalem, followed Marcus’s observation of the existence of two forms of privacy: a physi-cal privacy alongside privacy of information. He argued that physiphysi-cal privacy was highly esteemed by Jerusalemites, who were willing to infringe on privacy of information in order to protect the physical privacy. Here Ze’evi ratifi es Marcus on another point—namely, the gap between cultural ideals and social realities. People were willing to expose themselves intimately before the authorities as a means to minimize potential social and fi nancial damage, if the authorities would not divulge that sensitive information. This explains why the people of Jerusalem used to tell the authorities about their neighbors when their behavior in private did not coincide with what they believed to be normal and moral, and why Jerusalemites endured their neighbors prying into their private affairs. Ze’evi sums up by saying that upholding physical privacy (including favoring it over other aspects of privacy) served as a basic principle in the consensual public order.⁴⁶

Eli Alshech has added legal theory to the discourse about privacy.

Marcus, Abu-Lughod, and Ze’evi studied court cases, whereas Alshech analyzed fi qh treatises that tried to conceptualize what privacy should mean rather than apply it to concrete situations. In his 2004 article, Alshech studied early Muslim legal thought and concluded that privacy, despite lacking a specifi c term, was a legal category. Furthermore, the notion evolved from the limited concept of privacy as tied to property rights to a separate legal category. His argument is that legal scholars adopted an instrumental approach to “privacy.” It was not the fi nal objective but a means to an end, that end being social control. Here Alshech echoes previous scholarly discourse that positioned “privacy”

as a basic principle in maintaining a viable Muslim society.⁴⁷

Paulina B. Lewicka discussed private acts in the public domains in her study of medieval Egyptian eating habits. She was interested in understanding why, contrary to common wisdom, no public consump-tion facilities like restaurants, taverns, or inns existed in pre-Ottoman Cairo. Although buying ready-made food was totally acceptable, negative attitude toward eating in the street as being undignifi ed persisted. As Muslim legal sources did not restrict the eating premises to the private domain (and in fact inhabitants of Abbasid Baghdad often ate their meals in restaurants), Lewicka looks for the answer in the Arab customs and social practices pertaining to hospitality and territoriality. She concludes that eating was an intimate act. As such, food was supposed to be consumed, shared, and enjoyed in a private and friendly territory. Such sites were not only the private home but also a familiar public place like a neighborhood mosque.⁴⁸

Most recently Iris Agmon revisited the defi nition of the term

“privacy” and pointed out its weakness. While discussing family experiences in the Palestinian port cities of Haifa and Jaffa in the late Ottoman period, she argues that previous scholarship presupposed that the upper class defi ned cultural ideals about privacy and family.

In this line of reasoning, the lower classes are portrayed deterministi-cally as a materialistic construction whose own cultural preferences are the outcome of the lack of means to maintain the ideal. For the purpose of this discussion, I focus on her explanation that the very choice of the term “privacy” is misleading, as the cultural ideal was neither personal privacy nor the boundaries between the individual and the public. Rather, it was groups defi ned in terms of gender and family that were supposed to be separated. The issue at hand was female chastity and seclusion from nonfamily men, and not individual privacy per se. Marcus and Ze’evi had already brought this up, but Agmon is the one who highlights it.⁴⁹

Now we add the medical context to the discussion of what pri-vacy could mean to various Middle Easterners. Medical scenes like those we have seen above reinforce Lewicka’s claim of the possibility of privacy in the public sphere—for instance, through a gendered defi nition of privacy, as Agmon has pointed out. In other words, private and public domains were not opposite poles but positions on a continuum.

Bathing is perceived (by us moderns?) as a private and intimate action, yet we see that it was done in the normal course of events in groups and in public. Even if the illuminated miniatures were artistic interpretation rather than documentaries of concrete realities, they attest to social norms. And these norms allowed Ottomans to bathe in places open to all, like public baths (or hammams), pools, and rivers. In such places other people were present as well. The boundaries between the individual and the public are blurred here.

But in fact the danger of exposure to possible foreigners was limited due to various mechanisms. Bathing in these sites was arranged in a way that created an intermediate reality between total exposure and total seclusion.

A neighborhood hammam, for example, fi lled more than the functional role of providing bathing services. It was a friendly place where part of the neighborhood social life was conducted. The public bath was not private territory; it belonged to all. One could count on meeting people one knew for many years. Moreover, gender bound-aries were meticulously respected. As we can see in the miniatures above and others like them, only men were present: men and women bathed in separate groups. Hence the hammam was willingly visited, well known, and safe.

Even in hospitals, where one did not know the other patients, privacy within the public domain existed. The physical structure of the hospital will be analyzed in detail in the fourth chapter, but here I can mention already that the intrusion of the outside world was checked with walls, gardens, and doorkeepers. Although privacy and physical isolation of the individual played a minor role in shaping the hospital’s inner space, gender segregation (as discussed in the next chapter) was implemented and helped to create a sense of privacy.

These scenes are different from those in the literary and visual descriptions of Europeans, who were excited by the mystique of the hammam. Their imagination added erotic motifs to the descriptions.

Such motifs are missing from Ottoman miniatures, which deal with the human body in the context of physical and moral cleanliness and hygiene, rather than eroticism.

The hammam was of great signifi cance to the Muslim commu-nity—both healthy and ill. The hammam was a social and ritualistic center. People went to the hammam regularly, thrice or four times a week, according to European travelers. Ottomans believed that bathing there was healthy for them. Women, for example, bathed to keep their health and maintain their youth and beauty (as will be discussed below, physical appearance was an important characteristic of Ottoman society; it was one of the criteria for securing a position in the Ottoman administration). The cost of entering the hammam was reasonable, which made it easier for anyone to go there.⁵⁰

The association of the hammam with health was prevalent in Ottoman popular lore. In Istanbul bath attendants bled their cus-tomers as part of the service, which included pummeling, rubbing, washing, body-hair removal, and massaging—or so claimed Salomon Schweigger, a chaplain to the Habsburg embassy in the capital during 1577–81.⁵¹ In North Africa the institution was called “the silent doc-tor”: its warm air and the increased perspiration it generated were claimed to cure various ailments, such as rheumatism. Pregnant women went to the bath to secure quick and uncomplicated delivery.⁵² This theme of the benefi t of hot water was echoed in religious literature and Prophetic medicine treatises alike. One tradition of the Prophet claimed that fever was caused by steam from hell, and should be extinguished with water.⁵³

The advantages of the hammam were elaborated also by learned medical treatises of the time. Authors discussed baths as a means to return people suffering from “dry” symptoms to their “wet” balance.

For example, bathing was a usual treatment for madness. Since mad-ness was considered to originate in extreme cases of drymad-ness in the patients’ body, baths were supposed to return the needed moisture to the body. Thus, a madman needed to regain the balance of his humors, and, as a result, his sanity.

This is the context that explains why baths made their way into hospital practice. Hospitals employed bathhouse attendants (dellak or külkhani). Their task was also to maintain the personal hygiene of the patients in general, in addition to providing washing directly directed to the therapeutic process. The attendants shaved the patients and clipped their nails while washing them.⁵⁴

Maintaining sanitary conditions was important in the hospital.

This institution employed a team of people whose task was maintain-ing the bodily hygiene of the patients. In addition to the bathhouse attendants, there were launderers (sing. cameƒuy or ghessal) who washed the patients’ clothes and replaced their blankets and mattresses. The

expenses of the hospital in Edirne at the end of the fi fteenth century included grass for the mats (it also included soap, most probably for the bathhouse).⁵⁵ In the hospital in Manisa the washers’ duty was double: to maintain the physical cleanliness of the patients in this world and to ritually cleanse their bodies after death.⁵⁶

Other employees were responsible for cleaning the facilities and dealing with the regular and continuous physical maintenance of the hospital buildings. Sweepers (singular ferraƒ) picked up garbage from the fl oor and carried it outside to the nearest garbage dump. In one Istanbul hospital the two sweepers divided the work between them:

one cleaned the hospital from within; the other cleared waste from the building.⁵⁷ A gardener (sing. bakhçuwan) nurtured the garden. A well-kept garden was an important part of the hospital physically and therapeutically (this theme is picked up in the fourth chapter).

Renovators-cum-odd-job-men (sing. mirimeti or mani‘-i nuquƒ) took care of the building itself to prevent the walls from falling down or getting dirty.⁵⁸ The cleanliness of the hospital and its immediate surround-ings and the aesthetic of the building and environments were of great importance, and therefore money was invested in their upkeep.

Hammams operated inside many Ottoman hospitals. In some hospitals, the hammam was part of the original plan of the institution.

This was the case in the sixteenth-century hospitals of Süleyman I, Hurrem Sultan, and Nurbanu Sultan, all in Istanbul. In others it was added as an afterthought. A hammam was added to the older hospital of Mehmet II in Istanbul, following the appeal of the chief physician, Haji Musa. His petition to the sultan, which he presented in person to the imperial council in October 1577, touched upon the welfare of his patients as the reason for his request. Haji Musa explained that a hammam was needed for the patients, and while all the other imperial hospitals had one, the hospital of Sultan Mehmet II lacked a bath. The doctor was clever enough to point out that as the fi nan-cial management of the hospital was meticulous, there were enough surpluses for that project and no additional funds were needed. The sultan, Murad III (reigned 1574–95), granted his wish, but added a caveat: if the building of a bathhouse were to result in a shortage of medications for the patients, the person causing that would bear the whole responsibility of his misdeed.⁵⁹

Medical qualities were also attributed to natural water reservoirs.

Evliya Çelebi surveyed the hot springs associated with medical quali-ties all around the empire (hence the varied terminology designating such a place) and the popularity of immersion in them. He mentioned those in Istanbul, in the neighborhoods of Eyüp and Hasköy, along

the Golden Horn.⁶⁰ It was Bursa, however, which was famous for its many springs and their virtues. Evliya mentioned the great popularity of visiting these springs from all around the empire. He wrote that sometimes the water coming from the depths of the earth was so hot that whoever bathed in it was “cooked.” But even if the water was not that hot, bathing in those springs was healthy, and the longer one stayed immersed in these waters, the better for body and mind.

Evliya graded the quality of the springs in Bursa. “The Old Spring”

(on top of which Murad I Hudavendigar, who reigned 1360–89, built an impressive dome) was the most benefi cial. The second in quality was the spring of Çekirge Sultan, whose water was especially benefi cial for those affl icted with skin problems. Evliya also claimed that the wretched who drank from its water for forty days would be cured from leprosy (by God’s will) for forty years.⁶¹

Legends were associated with the springs in Bursa and explained their qualities. One legend was mentioned by Thevenot, who visited there in August 1656. According to him, a princess was affl icted with leprosy and became ugly, and therefore no one would agree to marry her; she bathed in one of the Bursa springs and was cured.⁶² This is a known literary topos. Because of its legendary character, it is con-nected to no specifi c place and time, and can be attributed to almost any place. Indeed, a similar legend was told about Urfa (today in eastern Turkey), where there were many lepers in Thevenot’s time, the middle of the seventeenth century. The local lepers bathed in a special pool outside the city, next to the southern gate of the wall.

They believed they would be cured by the water there, just like the legendary leper king of the city, a contemporary of Jesus. According to a popular myth, he bathed there and was healed. The king attrib-uted his miraculous cure to a factor other than the water itself. Here

They believed they would be cured by the water there, just like the legendary leper king of the city, a contemporary of Jesus. According to a popular myth, he bathed there and was healed. The king attrib-uted his miraculous cure to a factor other than the water itself. Here