Baths of Kaltakçı Nazır Baba

The Baths of Kaltakçı Nazır Baba are a historic Ottoman hammam in Efeler District of Aydın Province in western Turkey, in the provincial capital of a region at the heart of the ancient Maeander valley, one of the most culturally rich landscapes in the ancient Aegean world. The name Kaltakçı Nazır Baba preserves the memory of a local religious or community figure — a baba in the Sufi or Anatolian folk religious tradition — whose spiritual authority was honoured by attaching his name to the hammam he endowed or blessed for his community. The baths served the residents of Aydın, built near the ancient city of Tralles, a region whose bathing tradition extends back through Byzantine and Roman thermae to the Hellenistic civic culture of one of antiquity's most prosperous Aegean valleys.