It is Turkish coffee with no coffee. And the internet has a war that never ends: steam room, or sauna?

In the 1850s an Irish doctor, Richard Barter at Blarney, tried to build a Turkish bath in a thatched hut shaped like a beehive. It couldn't get hot enough. So he changed the recipe: hot, dry air, healthier than steam, he thought. He called it the improved Turkish bath, and Britain copied it hundreds of times.

So the steam camp's most famous baths were on the dry side all along. And the hamam itself grew from Rome's hot room, heated from under the floor; the Islamic baths that came after piped in the steam.

Steam or dry is not a war. It is a family argument, two thousand years old. In Finland, we settle it with one ladle.

Steam room or sauna?

Sources: Malcolm Shifrin, Victorian Turkish Baths (Historic England, 2015) and victorianturkishbath.org: more than 600 Victorian Turkish baths in Britain and Ireland; Dr Richard Barter, St Ann's, Blarney: the first experimental bath, a "little beehive-shaped thatched building", could not heat the air enough; his "improved Turkish bath" used dry hot air, which he thought medically better than the humid hammam; the first public Turkish bath in England, Manchester, 1857. Maréchal, "From balnea to Hammams", Al-Qantara 44(1), 2023: early Islamic baths added a water boiler over the furnace, piping steam into the hot room that Roman baths heated from under the floor.
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