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Contemporary Art Enters Istanbul’s Deep Past at Koza Güreli’s Zeyrek Çinili Hamam

The restored 16th-century hammam layers archaeology, communal ritual and contemporary art, with Alex Červený’s “Atlas of Encounters” currently unfolding in its Byzantine cistern.

One of the most fascinating aspects of contemporary art is its ability to open new narrative possibilities in places already dense with layered pasts. Zeyrek Çinili Hamam is one such space, and perhaps one of the most compelling examples in Turkey of how a context-sensitive hospitality project can integrate heritage preservation, archaeological research and contemporary artistic production without reducing one to the backdrop of the others.

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Acquired in 2010 by Marmara Group, one of Turkey’s leading hospitality groups, the present-day Zeyrek Çinili Hamam emerged out of a 13-year restoration of a 16th-century double hammam. “We have residences, hotels, extended stays and other hospitality projects, and we were looking to expand our knowledge in hospitality,” Koza Güreli told Observer when we visited the space to preview the on-site exhibition. Her mother initially had the idea, she added, and Güreli took over the lead after her mother retired. Güreli’s father is the founder of Turkey’s key art fair, Contemporary Istanbul, and has long been collecting art. Güreli recalls growing up around fairs before beginning to collect herself at age 26. “I was always interested in art, but I never had a plan to create an art space. The hammam was not initially conceived as an art venue. Then it came together.”

Located in the Zeyrek district on the city’s historic Golden Horn peninsula, part of the UNESCO World Heritage list, the Zeyrek Çinili Hamam is a unique heritage building that embodies different moments of the city’s history. The roughly 32,000-square-foot bath was commissioned in the 1530s by Barbaros Hayreddin Pasha, the Ottoman grand admiral who helped transform the empire into a dominant Mediterranean naval power. He entrusted the project to Mimar Sinan, then in the early stages of a career that would later make him the sultan’s leading architect.

"Atlas of Encounters" Artist: Alex Červený Venue: Zeyrek Çinili Hamam Address: Zeyrek, İtfaiye Cd. No:44, 34083, Istanbul Through: January 31, 2027

The project proved unusually ambitious. No known hammam of the period appears to have possessed a tile program of comparable richness: more than 10,000 blue-and-white İznik tiles are believed to have once covered its interiors, incorporating 37 distinct patterns produced specifically for the building. Indeed, the richness of the decoration gave the hammam its name: çinili, or “tiled.”

Over the centuries, the building changed hands and underwent successive alterations, eventually falling into disuse as the hammam’s communal role diminished with the spread of domestic plumbing in the 19th Century. This gave the antiquities dealer Ludovic Lupti the opportunity to acquire the tiles around 1874 and sell them in Paris. An anonymous memorandum submitted to Sultan Abdülhamid II some years later lamented the removal and sale of the tiles as part of a broader depletion of the Ottoman Empire’s artistic heritage. Dispersed around the world, some are now held by major museums, including the Louvre, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon; others are in private collections.

The restoration resisted the temptation to reconstruct what could no longer be known. Cengiz Kabaoğlu and KA-BA Architecture, who led the architectural conservation and restoration project, refused to reproduce the missing İznik tiles or manufacture the illusion of an intact 16th-century interior. Instead, they preserved the traces of what remained: worn marble, fragments, scars, painted surfaces and absences.

It took more than a decade of restoration, archaeological excavation and archival research to reconstruct this fragmented history. During the work, nearly 3,000 pieces of 16th-century İznik tile were recovered from the site. “It was not supposed to become a heritage project at the beginning, but it became one,” Güreli acknowledged, emphasizing that, as a family, Marmara Group has always valued heritage buildings. They recently renovated Esma Sultan Palace on the Bosphorus, now an event space. “Personally, we like antique things and old things. We like preserving them.”

A selection of what was recovered is now on display in the museum integrated into the complex. The exhibition design developed by the German studio ATELIER BRÜCKNER masterfully stages a narrative among the artifacts on view, which span 1,500 years, from the 5th Century through the Ottoman period and into the 20th, while a series of objects introduces visitors to the rich social history of hammam culture. One particularly striking display brings together dozens of wooden bath sandals, or nalın, some elaborately inlaid with mother-of-pearl and raised on astonishingly high platforms, whose varying heights were the only element distinguishing one class from another within the hammam. They were part of a broader personal apparatus of bathing: embroidered pouches containing soaps, combs, towels, bowls, scrubbing cloths and other objects required for the ritual.

These spaces were much more than a public utility or........

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