Kariye Sultan Baths

Kariye Sultan Baths is a historic Ottoman hammam in the Kariye neighborhood of Istanbul — named after the Kariye Mosque, formerly the Byzantine Church of the Holy Savior in Chora (Chora meaning 'country' or 'outside the walls'), which preserves some of the finest Byzantine mosaics and frescoes surviving anywhere in the world, creating one of Istanbul's most historically extraordinary neighborhood contexts for any public institution including this hammam. The Kariye neighborhood on the slopes of the sixth hill of Byzantine Constantinople, enclosed within the Theodosian walls, preserves some of the most historically layered urban fabric in Istanbul — a district where Byzantine church architecture, Ottoman wooden housing, and the remains of ancient walls create a palimpsest of historical settlement whose depth is unusual even in a city of incomparable historical richness. Kariye Sultan Baths provides the classical Ottoman bathing ritual in this extraordinary historical setting, offering the communal wellness tradition of the hammam to a neighborhood whose multi-layered Byzantine and Ottoman past gives every institution here a deeper resonance than facilities located in more recently developed parts of the city.