‘Whatever you want to pay me for, you can have,” a masseur named Karim tells me with a laugh, as we face each other in Ankara’s Tarihi Karacabey Hamami, one of the Turkish capital’s oldest bath houses. We’re both wearing just a small towel, and Karim also wears a grin.
What I pay for is a rigorous skin scrub and massage in the hammam’s steamy communal room, whose nourishing ambience is occasionally punctuated by whiffs of tobacco breath from the clientele.
