Hammam

What it is

The hammam is a steam bath, also called a “Moorish bath”, and descends from the baths of antiquity¹. For a thousand years, together with the mosque and the market, it formed part of the core of the city². It is embedded in the residential quarter and is a place of sociability³. In 2004 La Vie éco counted around 5,000 hammams in Morocco, about 1,000 of them in Casablanca⁴.

History

The forerunner of the oriental bath is considered to be the bath of the Umayyad palaces in Syria, with three rooms one behind the other, unheated, warm and hot, the hot one right next to the boiler⁵. The hammam had its heyday from the 11th to the 13th century, when the number of baths indicated the rank of a city⁶. In the west of the Islamic world, the baths took up Andalusian and Umayyad models⁷.

For Fez, the chronicle Rawd al-Qirtas gives 93 baths at the time of the Almohads; in 1942 there were thirty, in which more than 6,000 baths were taken every day⁸. Twenty-two of them at that time belonged to the habous, the religious endowments, which leased them out by auction; the hammam of Sidi Azouz dates from the Marinid period, from the same years as the Medersa Bou Inania⁹. The Hammam Seffarine in Fez was one of the case studies of the HAMMAM research project (2005–2008)¹⁰.

What it is made of

In old Fez the wooden buckets, holding a good 20 litres, came from the Kebabine quarter, which is named after them, and the copper boiler from the coppersmiths of the Seffarine; the fuel was wood, sawdust, olive residue and dung¹¹. La Vie éco lists women’s bathing kit as henna, ghassoul clay, the kis mitt, black soap, oils, mirror and perfume¹². Families in Fez fetched their ghassoul from eastern Morocco, kneaded it with water, dried it on the roof and mixed rose petals and camomile into it¹³.

To this day, heating is largely done with wood: the 2021 roadmap of the Ministry of Energy names woody biomass such as green waste, tree prunings and sawdust as the fuel of the hammams and bread ovens, and aims to reduce the pressure on the forests with alternatives to firewood in households and hammams¹⁴.

How it is made

In Fez in 1942, anyone who came to the bath to wash began with the rubbing; only afterwards could one soap oneself¹⁵. In the hot room the masseur kneaded the bather, rubbed down the skin with bare hands and then with the woollen mitt, and finished with soaping and rinsing; women first washed the henna out of their hair, rubbed themselves down and applied ghassoul¹⁶. Today in the women’s bath the tayaba, the bath attendant, takes care of the rubbing and soaping, applies henna or masks and serves tea at the end¹⁷.

When

On Fridays and on the eve of festivals the baths were full¹⁸; La Vie éco names the eve of Friday, of Ramadan and of the festivals¹⁹. In 1942 the hammam belonged to the men in the morning until one o’clock, and to the women in the afternoon until ten in the evening²⁰. The main season is the cold time of year²¹, and during Ramadan the regular customers of one women’s bath come about two hours before breaking the fast²².

Before the wedding, the bride in Fez took seven baths; at the last, the taqbib, the tayabat poured seven buckets of lukewarm water over her head²³. A woman who had just given birth went to the bath between the sixth and the twentieth day after the birth²⁴; for the bride and for the new mother, the nfissa, families used to rent the hammam for a few hours²⁵. Before the Feast of the Sacrifice, men and boys go to the barber and often to the bath as well²⁶.

How to recognise it

In 1942 a hammam in Fez had four main rooms one behind the other: el-gelsa for undressing and resting, el-berrani, the cold room, el-oustani, the warm one, and ed-dakhli, the hot one, at about 35 degrees and with a basin of hot water in front of the wall to the furnace²⁷. From the street, a passage with a bend leads to the rest room²⁸. Light enters only through glazed openings in the vaults and domes²⁹.