The Patroness: Nurbanu Sultan

Almost six decades before Çemberlitaş Hamamı came into being, in 1537, the Ottoman fleet under Admiral Hayreddin Barbaros raided the Greek islands of the Aegean and brought back to Istanbul 2,000 captured slaves. One of these slaves was to be Nurbanu Sultan, then a girl of no more than twelve years. We know nothing certain about her early life, and historians have constructed two different versions of her biography. In the first version – and the one advocated by Nurbanu herself – she was Cecilia Venier-Baffo, the illegitimate daughter of the Venetian governor of Paros, Nicolo Venier, and the noblewoman Violante Baffo. To bolster the story about her Venetian descent, Nurbanu claimed to remember her family's palace on the Grand Canal, but when the Venetian Senate tried to establish Nurbanu's ancestry on one occasion, their investigators could not arrive at any conclusive findings. The inability of the Venetian Senate to find any evidence on Nurbanu's family origins points to the second version. According to that second version, she was a Greek girl from the Venetianruled island of Corfu, by the name of Kale Kartanou. Once the Corfiote girl had entered the imperial harem, she might very well have elevated her status by claiming to be a member of Corfu's Venetian ruling elite.

A more recent study has called this second version ‘rather far-fetched’, and explains that her being described as Corfiote may derive from her being born on Paros but raised on Corfu.