HAMMAM GAZI-MEHMED-PACHA

This large building of the Ottoman period (Hamami i Gazi Mehmet pashës, Hamam Gazi Mehmed paše) is one of the two hammams which still remain in Prizren with the one which shelters the Archaeological Museum today. Created around 1563-1574, it is dominated in the north by the minaret of the Emin-Pasha mosque which was built in 1831. But it belonged then to the sharia (religious and commercial complex) of the Gazi-Mehmed-Pasha mosque located 150 m to the north-east. Used until the end of the nineteenth century as a public bath and place of socialization, the hammam is built according to the Byzantine technique of the partitioned apparatus, alternating stone and brick for better resistance. It is distinguished by its eleven openwork domes covered with lead, which let the daylight into the hot rooms of the baths, and by its two large domes mounted on drums covered with tiles, which are above the cold rooms. It is an çifte hamam, a "double hammam" in Turkish, with two parts separated by a partition, one for men and the other, here slightly smaller, for women. As part of the modernization of the city, all the stores and workshops that surrounded the building were destroyed in 1964. The hammam underwent two major renovations in the 1970s and 2000s, but unfortunately its interior walls have lost much of their plaster and paint. It now hosts temporary exhibitions or ephemeral markets.