Trier Part III – The Imperial Baths or Kaiserthermen

We follow the stairs down into the brick lined hallway, sinking feet below ground level, and I shiver. There’s a disconcerting shift in temperature that’s noticeable between one step and the next. It goes from a pleasantly warm day to startlingly cold. If the Imperial Baths in Trier were functional, the warm-to-cold experience would have been reversed. What we were walking through were the service corridors for the heating system below the baths and they would have been quite hot. 

Last week I wrote about the Trier Basilica but when we visited the city, we stopped by the Kaiserthermen, or Imperial Baths, first. This might have been the wrong order. I didn’t realize the baths were built to support Constantine’s move to the area until after touring the throne room. Regardless, the heating system below the Basilica is a small-scale version of what exists below the Kaiserthermen. It’s an impressive underground network of tunnels that weren’t finished for their initial purpose because Constantine shifted his political activities east midway through construction. My brain stumbles over that whole concept. So much invested only to be abandoned. The same thing happened to the Basilica. 

Anyway, above ground, the ruins look mostly like a rounded, many-arched-windowed wall with a wide field in front of it. I was prepared for lots of reading about what used to be there and not much seeing. What I didn’t realize was that much of the underground structure still exists. The farther we wandered, the more we got to see. My shift in world view that I’ve talked about in past posts involves the reality that the Imperial Romans didn’t know how to build small when it came to something the emperor wanted. I knew this…yet I didn’t have a concrete thing to attach my understanding to.

The Imperial Bath’s Layout

The Imperial Bath consisted mainly of three large pools. The first was a cold bath that would be used after cleaning with oil. The next was a warm bath that was an in-between level before heading inward to the apse that held the hot bath that came last. The heating system hid belowground in the tunnels I spoke of earlier. Boilers sat in chambers called hypocaustum and they heated steam that ran through pipes below the pools. 

All of this was paired with a field on the far end from the hot pool in which sporting events could be held. I would never have placed the two things together, but that’s what’s there. A walled field right next to the baths. 

The fantasy writer in me sees secret meetings in the underbelly of the baths with two spies sweating in the humid heat of the dark tunnels. A man working the boiler spotting an unusual figure who doesn’t belong. Or above ground, politics being hashed out in the steam of the heated pool, the principles just as murky as the air. Or an assassination attempt during a sporting event being held in the field just out front of the cold baths. Very public but also very confusing and possibly embarrassing as half the people running in the confusion afterward are naked. 

Sooo many story possibilities! Little nuggets to tuck away for later use. 

Blessings,

Jennifer

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