The Bath of the Dey

The Bath of the Dey is an example of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Algerian civil architecture. It is situated inside the citadel and is one of the earliest of its constructions. The bath is connected to the mosque of the Dey by a small two-storey edifice. The first level consists of a large columned hall and an ablution room that still bears the marks of the staircase that went up to the mosque. Before transformations were carried out during the colonial period, the room received light from a central courtyard whose marble tiling is still visible. Its fittings and its position between the hammam and the mosque of the Dey suggest that this area presumably fulfilled the function of a room for the Dey’s own use. The upper storey of the building served as housing for the personnel employed in the service of the bath.

The bath facility comprises several rooms. The first two are barrel vault chambers of the same length pierced with geometrically-shaped openings; they were the cold and warm rooms. The third chamber was the steam room; it is a square room topped with a cupola and is similar to those that can be observed in most Ottoman bathhouses. Today the entrance door to the bath is on the lateral side of the cold room. 

The boiler room and service spaces are adjacent to the bathhouse chambers. These small premises have a separate entrance, a sort of service door between the bath and the annexes. Overhead is a barrel vault ceiling bonded with a mixture of bricks and stone rubble.

The steam room is the most important room, as in the baths of Cairo and Turkey. Its square shape and eight-sided cupola supported by triangular niches give it a monumental aspect. The unusual separation of the functions of changing room and relaxation room is typical of Islamic bathhouses, where these rooms are given more importance than in Roman baths. Even if the example may seem remote in time, it is tempting to compare this bathhouse with the architectural layout of the Umayyad bath of Khirbat al-Mafjar (Palestine), where the bath was connected to an immense, monumental rest room. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Spain the same principle of organisation characterised the “princely” bath of the Alhambra in Grenada.

The adoption of the ancient system of hypocausts in this period cannot be linked to Ottoman habits: it was abandoned in the twelfth century in Syrian and Turkish baths, superseded by heating via ducts laid in the tiling. But in the bath of the Dey, as in Spain and Morocco, the hypocaust device remained in use. Of course it may be tied to Andalusian traditions, whose lineage it is possible to retrace. But these analogies with building and architectural traditions, whether Ottoman or Andalusian, must not conceal the features specific to Algerian baths, on which older models, in this instance Roman ones, doubtless had a certain degree of influence. Even if, by virtue of its location in the citadel, the bath of the Dey is considered to be an edifice designed for the sovereign and his retinue, one cannot help but notice the absence of all concern for a monumental layout. Compared to Eastern cruciform plans, the simplicity of design and execution and the parallelism that characterise the cold and warm rooms seem to be specific to the bathhouses of Spain and Morocco.