The Turkish towel began as the peshtemal — a flat-woven cotton wrap worn in the hammam, the Ottoman bath house. It was never designed to be a beach towel. It was designed to be worn in a hot, steamy room, where a thick towel would have stayed sodden and useless. Every feature travellers now prize — fast drying, light weight, flat packing — is a solution to a problem from six centuries ago.
The hammam: where the towel was born
The hammam was the public bath house of the Ottoman world — a centre of daily life, not merely a place to get clean. Bathers moved through a sequence of rooms of rising heat and steam.
In that environment a towel had two jobs. It had to preserve modesty — it was worn wrapped around the body, not carried — and it had to work when everything around it was damp. That ruled out anything thick. A heavy, plush towel in a steam room simply never dries; it grows heavier, colder and more unpleasant as the hours pass.
So weavers made the peshtemal: flat, thin, absorbent, quick to dry, and long enough to wrap. Function first.
Why the stripes and the fringe are still there
The details you see on a modern Turkish beach towel are not decoration invented by a marketing team.
The fringe is simply the warp threads of the loom, hand-knotted at the ends to stop the weave unravelling. It is structural. The stripes and bands came from regional weaving traditions — different towns, different patterns — and in some places the design signalled where the wearer came from. What began as a maker's mark became a style.
Then terry arrived — and the peshtemal was forgotten
Looped terry cloth spread through Europe in the 19th century, and it felt like an upgrade. It was plush. It looked luxurious. Industrial looms could produce it at scale. Thickness became a proxy for quality, and the thin flat-woven towel came to look like a poor relation.
For most of the 20th century the peshtemal survived mainly in Turkey itself — in hammams, in homes, sold in the bazaar — while the rest of the world bought terry.
The comeback: an old design meets a new problem
What brought it back was travel.
A thick terry towel is a genuine nuisance to travel with. It is heavy, it eats a third of a carry-on, it stays damp for a day, and at the beach it collects sand in its loops and refuses to give it back. Travellers rediscovered that a towel already existed which solved all four problems — and had solved them centuries earlier, for entirely different reasons.
| Hammam problem (1450s) | Beach problem (today) | Same solution |
|---|---|---|
| Must dry in a steam room | Must dry on a balcony overnight | Flat weave, no pile |
| Must be worn, not carried | Must fit in a beach bag | Light, packs flat |
| Must survive constant washing | Must survive salt, sun and sand | Long-staple cotton |
Why we make them the way we do
Arconiz works directly with manufacturers in Turkey — the same region, the same long-staple cotton, the same flat weave. We did not invent this towel and we would not claim to have improved on it. What we changed is the supply chain: no importer, no distributor, no licensing markup. That is the only reason a genuine Turkish beach towel from us starts at $15.99 instead of $45.
A 600-year-old design does not need reinventing. It needs to be made properly and sold honestly.
Read next: what is a peshtemal, the complete guide to Turkish beach towels, or browse the Turkish beach towel collection.
Written by the Arconiz team. Arconiz works directly with Turkish manufacturers to bring quality towels and home textiles to your door without the middleman. We test what we sell.
