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This chapter describes the hamam’s original appearance and how it began to take up work, having been readied for business with a supply of water and wood for fuel. The hamam’s employees (hamam managers, bathhouse attendants, servants, furnace stokers, and many others) and their organization in guilds make up one group of people connected to the monument, which can be identified based on archival and visual sources with relative certainty. More difficult to identify are the bathers; however, an analysis of the hamam’s neighbourhood’s make-up allows some answers. This chapter also provides a more detailed view of the hamam’s economic relation to the endowment, by looking at its income from entrance fees and at how much exactly it contributed to the endowment’s total income.

Do monuments have lives that justify writing their biographies? And if they do, are their lives punctuated by events and structured by relationships, similar to human lives? Do they have an identity of their own, and does this identity change over time? In addition to introducing the Çemberlitaş Hamamı briefly and providing a literature review of the topic of hamams, the introduction takes up these questions and examines the notions of individuality and biography within the Islamic and Ottoman context. Furthermore, it justifies applying the format of a biographical narrative to the history of the hamam.

This chapter describes the endowment that Nurbanu Sultan established, including a Friday mosque with many dependencies (schools, hospital, soup kitchen, inn) on the hills of Üsküdar. Furthermore, it analyses the economic relations between the charitable and the revenue-generating buildings and properties. Among these revenue-generating buildings counted the Çemberlitaş Hamamı, together with the Atik Valide Hamamı and the Büyük Hamam and the Havuzlu Hamam. Like a large, immobile grandee who lived a pious life in his mansion, distributing charity in the form of food, money and medicine to his kapı halkı, his retinue of dependents living in the neighbourhood, the mosque complex was not able to conduct the business necessary to sponsor that charity. Rather, it sent out its four sons (the four hamams) and relatives of its sons’ generation (residences, shops, workshops, mansions, farms and pastures) to do business on its behalf and to generate the large sums of money it needed to sustain itself and its philanthropic activities.