Introduction of To Western Europe
Turkish baths were introduced to Britain by David Urquhart, diplomat and sometime Member of Parliament for Stafford, who for political and personal reasons wished to popularize Turkish culture. In 1850 he wrote The Pillars of Hercules, a book about his travels in 1848 through Spain and Morocco. He described the system of dry hot-air baths used there and in the Ottoman Empire that had changed little since Roman times. In 1856 Richard Barter read Urquhart's book and worked with him to construct a bath. They opened the first modern Turkish bath in the British Isles at St Ann's Hydropathic Establishment near Blarney, County Cork, Ireland. The following year, the first bath of its type to be built in mainland Britain since Roman times was opened in Manchester, and the idea spread rapidly. It reached London in July 1860, when Roger Evans, a member of one of Urquhart's Foreign Affairs Committees, opened a Turkish bath at 5 Bell Street, near Marble Arch.
During the following 150 years, over 600 Turkish baths opened in Britain, while similar baths opened in other parts of the British Empire. Dr. John Le Gay Brereton, who had given medical advice to bathers in a Foreign Affairs Committee–owned Turkish bath in Bradford, travelled to Sydney, Australia, and opened a Turkish bath there on Spring Street in 1859, even before such baths had reached London. Canada had one by 1869, and the first in New Zealand was opened in 1874. Urquhart's influence was felt outside the Empire when in 1861, M. Hlasko opened one of the first Turkish baths in the United States at his Natatorium at 219 S. Broad Street, Philadelphia. Later municipal authorities also introduced Turkish baths as part of swimming pool complexes, taking advantage of the fact that water-heating boilers were already on site. In the East End of London, following the influx of Jews from Europe the authorities built six Turkish baths.
As of 2001 there were just sixteen Turkish baths remaining open in Britain, but hot-air baths still thrive in the form of the Banya (sauna) and the Finnish sauna.
Read more about this topic: Turkish Bath
Famous quotes containing the words western europe, introduction of, introduction, western and/or europe:
“In Western Europe people perish from the congestion and stifling closeness, but with us it is from the spaciousness.... The expanses are so great that the little man hasn’t the resources to orient himself.... This is what I think about Russian suicides.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“Such is oftenest the young man’s introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. The mass of men are still and always young in this respect.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is fatally easy for Western folk, who have discarded chastity as a value for themselves, to suppose that it can have no value for anyone else. At the same time as Californians try to re-invent “celibacy,” by which they seem to mean perverse restraint, the rest of us call societies which place a high value on chastity “backward.””
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“In Europe life is histrionic and dramatized, and ... in America, except when it is trying to be European, it is direct and sincere.”
—William Dean Howells (1837–1920)