A New Identity III: Tourist Attraction

While in 1841 Çemberlitaş Hamamı provided services to the local inhabitants and generated money for the Atik Valide Vakfı, a phenomenon emerged in Great Britain that in the long run would have a considerable global impact, and also come to shape the hamam's life: tourism. In 1841, Thomas Cook for the first time organised a train excursion, called a ‘tour’, of a group of 400 or 500 from Leicester to Loughborough and back. In the same year, the first national railway timetable, Bradshaw, appeared, and the first European hotel built as part of a railway station opened in York. Moreover, in the decade between 1830 and 1840, the camera had been invented and the term ‘sightseeing’ introduced into the English language. The railway and the steamship now made travel a more common pursuit and no longer restricted to the upper classes, who in the nineteenth century undertook recreational trips primarily to resorts along the shores of the Mediterranean. With Thomas Cook's invention of all-inclusive tours, travel became much cheaper and easier in terms of arranging transportation and accommodation. The decline of the aristocracy after the First World War meant that vacation resorts became accessible to anybody who had the necessary disposable income.

The phenomenon of tourism encompasses much more than the mere physical act of traveling to a specific place and back. Tourism is also an act of getting to know an exotic Other, an epistemological performance that finds its origins in a time-period when Europeans set out to explore and colonise new continents.