Palu Baths

Palu Baths is a historic Ottoman hammam in Palu, a district of Elazığ Province in eastern Anatolia — a region shaped by the Armenian, Kurdish, and Turkish cultural layers of a landscape dramatically transformed by the construction of the Keban Dam in the 1970s, which flooded the historic old town of Palu along with its ancient castle and many of its historic buildings. The hammam, if it survived the flooding or was rebuilt above the new waterline, represents the resilience of the Ottoman bathing tradition in a community that experienced radical geographical displacement while maintaining cultural continuity through the preservation of its social institutions. Palu Baths provides the classical Ottoman bathing ritual — steam, marble platform, kese exfoliation, foam massage — in the tradition of the public hammam that has served as a cornerstone of communal life in this eastern Anatolian community through the dramatic changes that have shaped the region's human geography in the twentieth century.