- Period
- Ayyubid, 13th c.
- Rooms
- Dressing, warm, hot, steam
- Plumbing
- Earthenware hot and cold pipes
- Roof
- Domes with skylights
A fortress is a place designed around the possibility of siege. A hammam is a place designed around comfort. This building is both at once, and that is what makes it worth standing in.
The bath follows the full sequence a proper hammam requires: a dressing room to undress and rest, then a warm room, then the hot room, then steam. Earthenware pipes ran through the structure carrying hot and cold water where they were wanted. Above, the domes are pierced with small skylights — the round glazed openings that drop shafts of light through the steam, which is the effect every hammam in the Islamic world is built to produce.
Getting water up here at all was the hard part; the Citadel's shafts run more than a hundred metres down through rock. The court spent that water on bathing.