Dombey Baths

The Dombey Baths are a historic Ottoman hammam in Çivril District of Denizli Province in southwestern Turkey, in the upper Büyük Menderes (Maeander) valley where one of the ancient world's most famous rivers flows through a broad fertile plain framed by the mountains of ancient Phrygia and Lydia. Çivril is the gateway to the remarkable Beycesultan archaeological mound, one of the largest Bronze Age sites in western Anatolia with occupation spanning from the Chalcolithic to the Iron Age, and the Ottoman hammam of this district represents the most recent major layer of a continuously inhabited landscape stretching back more than five thousand years. The baths served the agricultural community of the upper Maeander valley, where the great river's alluvial plains have supported productive farming in a landscape saturated with ancient history from Hittite to Greek to Roman to Byzantine to Ottoman times.