The public bath or hamam was fixture of most Ottoman towns. When interest in seaside summer spaces grew during the nineteenth century, this urban space was adapted to an aquatic one in the form of sea baths that littered the Bosphorus and appeared in some other coastal cities of the Ottoman Empire. In this episode, Burkay Pasin offers an overview of this emergent public space, which he describes as a transitional point in the transition from the private, gender segretated spaces of the hamam to the form of the public beaches found in Turkey today.

More at: http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2014/02/ottoman-empire-beaches-bathing.html

Burkay Pasin is completing a doctorate in history at Middle East Technical University in Ankara and is currently a lecturer at Izmir University of Economics.

Kalliopi Amygdalou is a doctoral candidate in the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College in London working on the relationship between national historiographies and the built environment in Greece and Turkey.