Greece’s Ottoman Heritage Bathing in the Ghost Hammam of Napflio

Abstract

This paper presents a video performance co-created with Aycan Kızılkaya at the Performing Space Conference 2023 workshop. Our video performance unfolds against the atmospheric backdrop of the Kapodistriou square in Napflio, featuring the ruinous Hammam and the fountain: iconic water monuments representing Ottoman cultural heritage.

The video engages with the architectural legacy of the Ottoman era through performance art, recalling the rituals of the Hammam, which can no longer be performed at its original location in Napflio. As visitors to the site and participants in the workshop from Turkey, we bring with us the embodied knowledge of these rituals, and through our performance, we aimed to breathe life into their memory. Therefore, the video also seeks to highlight Modern Greece and Turkey's shared architectural/cultural heritage, serving an educational function and a performative way of engaging with history.

The video commences at the Hammam building, adorned with a painting, “La Grande Piscine de Brousse,” by Jean-Léon Gérôme. Evoking the Hammam’s traditional function, the Orientalist painting imbues the site with a layer of fiction and fantasy, reminiscent of the Western perception of the “East,” including nineteenth-century Greece. The ambience is further enriched with the sound of water, enhancing the illusion of an Orientalist hammam setting. Subsequently, the narrative transitions to an awkward bath scene at the Ottoman fountain, grounding the viewer in the contemporary urban landscape with its everyday sounds and sights. By staging a bath within this public space, we aim to bridge the two monuments and provoke discomfort in the viewer, prompting them to question the fountain's ordinary function. This performative intervention activates the square both as a historical locus and a realm of imagination, rendering visible the connection of the Hammam and the fountain as sites of memory.