Hammam Sidna

The first information we possess about this bath comes from the Spanish monk Diego De Haëdo, who visited Algiers in the early seventeenth century. He mentioned the existence of some sixty bathhouses, one of which – the bath of the Pasha or Sidna Hammam –was very large and particularly beautiful. It is one of the largest Ottoman-era baths in the qasaba. The parcel it occupies is the size of the area of an Algiers dwelling.

It is made up of two separate juxtaposed parts: the changing room, with an apartment on the floor above it, and the bath proper, comprising the warm room and the steam room. The changing room looks like the ground floor of an urban dwelling, where the central courtyard is approached via a bent vestibule; it is surrounded by raised galleries fitted out as rest halls. The vestibule is a rectangular space capped with a barrel vault; its walls are completely covered with ceramic and a small masonry seat occupies the length of the wall opposite the entrance to the bath. The vestibule also gives access to the upper floor which houses a small dwelling for the owner or the personnel in charge of maintenance.

The bath consists of two rooms. The rectangular warm room looks like a simple transition area. In contrast, the steam room is a vast chamber under a cupola arranged around a square central space. Three of its sides open out onto large alcoves[1], similar to īwāns. One of these alcoves leads off to a rectangular room; the other two, which are not as deep, house wash basins that alternate with two cubicles that are capped with cupolas and also equipped with basins. At the centre of the steam room is a raised marble block whose sides are pierced with openings that release heat. It is used as a platform for massages.

This hammam is characterised by the centred plan of its steam room, where the central space is flanked by three alcoves forming a T-shaped arrangement and opening out to two cubicles on the outer edge. This T-shaped plan, already known in antiquity in Punic Carthage and similar to the Persian ’īwān, was reproduced on a large scale in Tunisian homes.

A look at even older bathhouses, in this instance those of Syria in the Umayyad period, reveals elements in both the steam rooms and the warm rooms that foreshadow an influential and monumental architectural development. Alcoves, apses and niches that timidly divided up the walls of these rooms and were sometimes arranged diagonally signal the birth of private areas.

It is in the architecture of the steam rooms in the baths of Algiers that the impact of Ottoman models can be observed. The centred plan with its niches and outlying cubicles and its cupola ceiling are the most prominent features. Like Syrian and Egyptian baths of the Ottoman period, the baths of Algiers imitated the most unpretentious Turkish models.

[1] The European word “alcove” is derived from the Arabic word  al-qubba, meaning cupola.