Sultan Amir Ahmad Bathhouse

In Safavid-era Isfahan, public bathhouses outnumbered mosques, and by some counts there were more than 270 of them. Iranians went to get clean, but they also went to gossip, gamble, catch up on the news, and occasionally discuss the overthrow of whoever was currently in charge, all while being scrubbed down by a professional.

The Sultan Amir Ahmad Bathhouse in Kashan was built in the 16th century for exactly this purpose. It has a dressing hall with an octagonal pool, a hot bathing hall heated from below, and a domed ceiling studded with convex glass bubbles that let in light without letting anyone outside see in. The corridor connecting the two halls turns several times on purpose, so nobody moving between rooms takes the shock of going straight from steam to cold air.

In 1778, an earthquake tore through Kashan and took much of the bathhouse with it. Qajar-era craftsmen rebuilt what was lost, and later restorers counted seventeen separate layers of plaster applied over the centuries that followed.

Public bathing declined once households got their own plumbing. The building spent a stretch as a teahouse before it was formally restored into a museum in 1996. It survived an earthquake. Indoor plumbing is what finally closed it.