Unlike the life story of an Ottoman poet who constituted the subject of an entry in a biographical dictionary, or the life story of other Istanbul hamams which were demolished in the course of early Republican urban planning schemes, that of Çemberlitaş Hamamı does not terminate with a clear-cut ending defined by the disappearance of its physical existence. (Moreover, given its online presence and the possibilities that the digital age affords through 3D modeling, virtual reconstruction and the like, even its physical disappearance would not result in its complete demise.) Its life story, as it has been told here, ends not with death, but rather arbitrarily around 2004 with the completion of my research. A dozen years – eventful for Turkey, Istanbul and Çemberlitaş Hamamı, to say the least – have passed since then.

Following international high-profile events such as the success of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's film Distant at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival and Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Prize for literature in 2006, Istanbul rose to even greater prominence as tourist destination. For 2010, the city was chosen as the European Capital of Culture, resulting in a flurry of renovation and restoration work of Ottoman monuments, as well as a great variety of other cultural and artistic undertakings. In the same year, the New York Times ranked Istanbul in nineteenth place among ‘The 31 Places to Go in 2010’, so the title of the article. By then, the ever increasing influx of tourists had also begun to include a visibly greater percentage of visitors from the Middle East, so that many shops and restaurants in tourist-dominated areas now boast signs proclaiming that their staff speak Arabic. Under the AKP government, the promotion of Turkey's cultural heritage, especially of the Ottoman past, has attained unprecedented heights; for instance, in 2003 Miniatürk, a theme park featuring the 1/25-scaled miniature models of significant architectural monuments began to receive visitors and immediately became a great success. The Panorama 1453 Historical Museum, established in 2009 and an equally popular success, celebrates the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in a heroic narrative presented in the form of dioramas.