The Great Hammam of Pristina, a double bath awaiting its second life

The Great Hammam is the part of Pristina’s old town that most people walk straight past. It’s a low building hard by the Imperial Mosque that hasn’t worked for decades and has been a building site for years. Yet it’s one of the oldest monuments in the city and, for me, one of those that best explains how daily life ran in Ottoman Pristina. Here’s what the Ministry of Culture says about it and what to expect if you wander over.

A bathhouse from the 14th or 15th century

Nobody knows exactly when it was built. Working from the surviving records, the Ministry of Culture places it between the 14th and 15th centuries and says whole generations of locals used it. It stands on Vasil Andoni street, in a cluster the record considers as important as the building itself, with three historic mosques, the Pristina clock tower, several protected houses and a market around it.

Its grandest neighbour is the Imperial Mosque, dated 1461. Mosque and bathhouse went together in the Ottoman town, and here they still stand a few metres apart.

What was it like inside?

It was a double hammam, what Turkish calls “çift”, with two sections so men and women could use it at the same time. According to the Ministry, it followed the classic layout the Ottomans inherited from Roman baths. There was a central anteroom that served as the changing room, a warm room you passed through and the hot room, with a boiler for the water, roofed with 18 domes.

The building has changed a great deal, especially on its main and eastern fronts, but the record stresses that the original plan and most of the structure survive. That’s why the Ministry rates it so highly, for its history, its social role and even its spiritual one, because the bath was a meeting place for the town and not just somewhere to wash.

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From bathhouse to storeroom to building site

The recent history is less kind. The hammam stopped working as a bath in 1960 and was partly used afterwards as a storeroom and a shop. From 1989 it had no maintenance at all, even though it counts as one of Pristina’s most important monuments. In 2007 money started going into a conservation and restoration plan, the plan was finished in 2009 and work began that same year, still ongoing according to the record.

No official source I checked gives a reopening date or says what the building will be used for once the work is done. So I won’t promise you anything I don’t know.

Is it worth a detour?

Yes, if you’re in the old town anyway, because it’s right beside what you’ll be seeing regardless. Walk round it, notice how long it is, which is the trace of the two wings, and look up at the domes on the roof. If Ottoman baths interest you, add the Prizren hammam, the bath of Gazi Mehmed Pasha, dated by the Ministry of Culture to the 16th century.

I’d fit it into the first loop of the morning, with the mosque and the tower, then carry on to Pristina’s old bazaar and the Ethnological Museum, a few minutes away. It’s the route I suggest for one day in Pristina.

So you do not lose the morning at the ticket office, browse tickets and tours in Great Hammam of Pristina on GetYourGuide.

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