Ottoman double bath · lead domes
An Ottoman double bathhouse with star-shaped skylights in its domes, seen from outside near the Old Bazaar.
These are the stories you can open in the 3D view, each at its own numbered point on the model.
This low stone building crowned with lead domes is the Deboj Hammam, an Ottoman public bath.
Its date is uncertain. Macedonian sources place it in the 15th century and suggest it may be the old hammam of Sungur Çavuş Bey; other sources date it to the 17th or 18th century. Both dates are given here because the question is still open.
Deboj is a double hammam, a çifte hamam: two complete baths under one roof, one for men and one for women, each with its own entrance. Here the women’s side is said to be the larger of the two.
In this model the two big domes cover the two dressing halls, and the warm and hot rooms lie between them under the small domes.
Look at the domes from above. They are pierced by small skylights in the shape of stars, closed with glass.
They let soft daylight into the steamy rooms while keeping most of the heat inside, so the bath needed almost no windows in its walls. In this model they glow at night, as if the lamps inside were lit.
The hammam was heated from below. Hot air from a furnace ran through channels under the floor, a hypocaust like those of Roman baths, and warmed the marble from beneath.
Bathers moved from the cool dressing hall to a warm room and on to the hot room, where they rested on a heated central platform. Press “Inside” to see a typical layout; a measured plan of Deboj has not been published.
The walls are built of rough stone with bands of red brick, under a brick cornice. There are very few windows.
A bath kept its heat and its privacy behind thick, closed walls, and took its light from the roof instead. From the street the building looks almost like a fortress, until you notice the domes.
After it stopped working as a bath, Deboj was used as a warehouse and later as a department store. A photograph on Wikimedia Commons is titled “The hammam in Bitola, now a department store”.
The building was conserved in 1967. Shop signs still hang on its walls, but the domes keep the memory of what it once was.
About 150 m to the north stands the Gazi Hajdar Kadi Mosque, built in 1561/62. Its slender minaret, rebuilt in 2016, rises above the roofs of the quarter.
Bathing was part of daily life in an Ottoman town, and this neighbourhood on the left bank of the Dragor had both a mosque and a hammam within a few minutes’ walk.
Typical prices are our estimates for orientation, not menu prices. Check opening hours on the spot.
Walk around the model, switch between day and night, and hear each story read aloud in English, Macedonian or Turkish.
Open in 3D
