Yelli Baths

The Yelli Baths are a historic Ottoman hammam in Milas District of Muğla Province in southwestern Turkey, in the ancient Carian heartland where Mylasa (Milas), Halicarnassus, Labraunda, and Stratonikeia were among the great cities of the pre-Hellenistic and Hellenistic world. Milas and its surrounding district preserve an extraordinary density of ancient monuments — temples, tombs, mausolea, and sanctuary sites — that testify to the sophisticated bathing culture of the Carian civilisation, and the Ottoman hammam tradition simply added the most recent layer to a region with millennia of bathing heritage. The Yelli Baths served the local community of the Milas district with the weekly bathing facility that was essential to Ottoman civic life in a landscape saturated with the architectural remains of civilisations that prized thermal culture as highly as any in the ancient world.