Any moment now, the man with the moustache was going to punch me straight in the face. Whack! I daren’t open my eyes for fear of the boiling suds that streamed down my face each time his sponge smacked on to my scalp. But I could just picture him taking full-square aim.

Why would my assiduously polite Turkish masseur want to hit me? The guilty English-abroad conscience is never short of reasons: Iraq, Man United, Tony Blair, Gallipoli, European Union accession… could be anything. And anyway, I had clearly requested the Cagaloglu Hamam’s house specialty, the “pummeling full-body massage” – and pummeling is precisely what you get.

Hooray for hairy-chested manhood. You can make your modern “men’s spas” as hetero-friendly as you like, with PlayStations, lads’ mags and boxercise, but every geezer worth his old-fashioned chromosomes is innately suspicious of pampering. All that clinical niceness and those huge towelling robes put the staid male psyche in mortal fear of suffocation.

What you need is a good old-fashioned Turkish bath. If you seek the real, real thing, head for Istanbul, to the Cagaloglu Hamam. The building itself, a marvel of classical pillars and domes, was built 1741 by Sultan Mehmen I as a gift to the city. It claims to be the oldest in Turkey and it is handily placed for historic city sites such as the Blue Mosque and the Covered Bazaar. Public baths were originally founded by the Romans, who passed the tradition to the Byzantines and on to the Turks. Hamams were built to satisfy the Koran’s demand for cleanliness and the Oriental desire for bodily pleasure and architectural beauty.

First impressions of the entrance, off a busy shopping street, are not quite so promising, but once inside the haven of the camekan, the entrance hall, you are in another time, another place. The service is Ottoman genteel: you are handed a key to your personal changing cubicle, a wood-brass-and-glass affair with the Edwardian air of a Pullman diner. The staff speak good English and welcome foreign visitors. Then your masseur arrives to guide you to the hararet, the hot room, a white marbled temple of temperature. In one corner is the super-hot room, where I sat amid the echoes of steam-hiss and flesh slapping on stone floor, as my muscle-knots began to melt away. Time dissolved, too, until Hamed reappeared to summon me on to the octagonal dais which is the steam-room’s centrepiece.

Now, here’s me, wearing only a skimpy, slippery towel, alone in a bath-house with a muscular guy wearing a Freddie Mercury ‘tache and bearing a bucket of hot soapy water. And now there’s you, thinking exactly the same as I was. Such schoolboy phobias were dispelled by his first wrestler’s grab of my arm. Ouch. This was workmanlike, everyday stuff to him, so I had better settle into it – and try not to flinch. After 15 minutes spent lying on a boiling wet marble floor having my limbs, torso, fingers, toes and deep musculature expertly wrenched, twisted, pulled, scrubbed, thumped and kneaded, I had reached another plateau of consciousness, a strange, placid place where resignation had displaced all resistance.

I had originally ordered the “Complete bath service” at €20 euros, but now Hamed was warmly recommending I pay him €10 more, for the full “Complete Oriental luxury service”. Well, with a mind lulled by therapeutic torture, what other answer could there be but, “Yes please”? And this was despite the fact that Hamed’s ability to smile serenely while inflicting extreme massage had begun to strike me as vaguely sinister.

Thus I found myself pressed, pulled and boiled all over again, to the point when I was getting mild-blackout fuzz in my vision. I think my blood pressure must have gone rather low. And then, there I was sitting cross-legged next to a marble fountain-trough while gallons of hot shampoo suds got smacked onto my head. Was this as far as things went? Was the full-bodied smack in the puss next?

Of course, it wasn’t. After a vigorous rinse-down I was left to recover my senses beneath the high-vaulted windows of the steam-room dome, marvelling at life, and at the efficiency of the heating and the beating, before I moved on the last part of the hamam ritual, a glass of sweet tea in the covered courtyard. I looked through the hamam’s list of notable former clients, and wondered how many had found themselves requesting the full third-degree treatment, too. There have been plenty of them - including Kaiser Wilhelm, Franz Liszt, Rudolf Nureyev and Cameron Diaz.

Yes, Cameron Diaz: there is a separate women’s side to the Hamam. The penalty for men caught there used to be death. My wife, Kate, reports that her female masseuse was thorough, gentle, soothing and caring. But what’s the point of going all the way to Istanbul for that?

Cagaloglu Hamami, Cagaloglu 34110 Istanbul, Turkey (01212 522 24 24; www.cagalogluhamami.com.tr)

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