Yeşildirek Baths (Konak)

The Yeşildirek Baths (Green Column Baths) are a historic public hammam in Konak District of İzmir Province, the central administrative and commercial heart of İzmir — Turkey's third-largest city, the principal port of the Aegean coast, and one of the most cosmopolitan and commercially dynamic cities in the eastern Mediterranean since antiquity. Konak's historic centre, anchored by the famous clock tower and the labyrinthine Kemeralti bazaar, was the urban core of a great trading city where Turkish, Greek, Jewish, Armenian, and European communities coexisted for centuries, and its hammams served a diverse urban population whose social needs were as cosmopolitan as the city's commercial life. The Yeşildirek Baths provided the central-city community of İzmir with the communal bathing ritual that was as much a social institution as a hygienic necessity in the Ottoman empire's most internationally connected Aegean port.