From Banyabaşı to Bath Square: Thermal Water, Space, and Place in the Making of Post-Ottoman Sofia

• In Event: Collecting, Preserving, Restoring, and Displaying the Ottoman Architectural Heritage of the Balkans in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century

Abstract

In the Bulgarian nation-state, established in 1878 in the aftermath of a war between the Russian and Ottoman empires, the modernization discourse was focused on the capital city’s historic center. Sofia, one of the oldest urban agglomerations in Southeast Europe, had emerged and evolved around a thermal spring. During the Ottoman period in Sofia’s history, the area of the thermal spring, known as Banyabaşı, housed several public baths and other water facilities. Banyabaşı was at the center of a water culture that permeated everyday life in Sofia and the Sofia plain. With the establishment of the Bulgarian nation-state, however, space and place would be reconceptualized in a way that prioritized nation over nature. This paper traces the debate about the making of Bath Square, modern Sofia’s representative center. I show how over the course of three decades and a half, from the late 1870s until the early 1910s, Sofia’s historic center was stripped of its Ottoman-era water facilities. Even the city’s most iconic structure, the old men’s bath, did not stand a chance against the march of modernity and the construction of Bath Square as a symbol of the nation-state. The new buildings that were erected at Bath Square in the 1910s represented not the relationship between nature and culture but the success of the nation-state and the steadfast pursuit of modernity.

Author

• Stefan Peychev, Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (Bulgaria)