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LAST UPDATE | 6 May
Around Ireland, saunas have become new hubs of community as thousands of people are being drawn to the powerful forces of fire, water, steam and sweat. Sweathouse, a new book by Rosanna Cooney, threads together the 3,000-year-old tradition of sauna in Ireland and reveals for the first time how this ‘new craze’ is a forgotten Irish legacy, smouldering just below the surface, waiting for its moment to catch fire again.
Combining in-depth research with personal experience, Cooney crawls inside enigmatic stone sweathouses in search of their long-held secrets, and traces Ireland’s extraordinary role in the spread of sweat-bathing across the world. Here, she shares a chapter from her new book, one from her travels to Finland, where she went to research unbroken sauna traditions…
THE MAN BESIDE me smiles and says something in Finnish. Quickly realising I don’t understand, he explains in English that he thought the singing children in the sauna were mine. The kids are laughing and playing together, their singsong voices sweet in the warm embrace of the heat.
I love that they are in here. The man introduces himself as Ulrik and tells me it’s around 110 degrees Celsius in the smoke sauna. I believe him. I watch as he takes a hose connected to a tap on the soot-blackened walls and rinses down the benches as people leave.
I have never seen anyone do this before. It seems so simple to use water to temper the wood, cooling it for skin. I have heard over and over again that Finns do not understand how people can be so unsure about what to do in a sauna; it is intuitive to them.
Watching Ulrik make the sauna more comfortable is the very beginning of my understanding of how the Finns’ attitude towards sauna is one of ease, not punishment. Why burn yourself when you don’t have to? Why endure a bad sauna when you can have a great one?
I am in Vantaa, on the outskirts of Helsinki, where I landed 90 minutes ago and took a cab straight to Cafe Kuusijärvi, a smoke sauna beside a pine forest lake. It has a summer camp feel to it, with people picnicking on the grassy knolls surrounding the wooden sauna, which folds into the forest.
It is one of the only public smoke saunas left near Helsinki. A wooden amphitheatre inside a log building, the sauna itself is close to four metres high. It has space for around 20 people, but there are just five or six today, including me, and a rotating chorus of children who come in and leave at their leisure, always staying in the relative cool of a low bench only slightly elevated off the floor. Children in Finland are at home in a sauna, there is no ‘first time’ for them because it is a place they have always been included in, ever since they arrived in utero.
Nervous about being exposed as a neophyte, I choose a spot where I can make an easy exit if the heat becomes too much and away from the humongous stove. At 1.5 metres across and topped with a mass of stones, it is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. There are no lights inside the sauna, just one small square window down by the children’s bench. In the wooden darkness, I can see the outline of other people, but nothing of their faces, not the tone of their skin or the emotions they hold.
The heat of the stones invades me, and I watch as my skin peppers sweat; watery blood pushing itself to the surface, keeping me alive. I have come to understand my body now as something I can rely on. As my blood pulses faster around my body, my sweat glands ramp up, and I drip droplets from my fingertips, rubbing my arms and legs to push the sweat down and off.
I notice no one else wipes their skin the way I do. Ulrik sits as though he is at his neighbour’s kitchen table. I try to emulate this stillness, but have to close my eyes to protect them from falling brine. There is no sand-timer counting the hot minutes, so I don’t know how long it is until my mind and body both tell me I’ve had enough.
I leave slowly, wishing I had watered my feet so the wooden steps wouldn’t burn my soles, and walk a few metres to the slatted jetty leading out to a beautiful freshwater lake framed by evergreen trees. I lower myself slowly into the water; it is a balmy 15 degrees, and I feel grateful I am here in the summertime, but I also have a hunger for real cold, the kind that takes my breath away.
Starfished on my back, I breathe out the stress of the plane journey and all that came before it. I paid €13 into this sauna and I can stay here until it closes, there is no time slot, no limit. I can touch the edge of my comfort in the heat, taking the time to “exit” without waiting for a knock on the door ending my session. What bliss.
For a long time, I lie on the jetty with my eyes closed, listening to my heartbeat and the sound of birds I’m noticing for the first time. I feel totally at ease with the world and yet actively part of it, scooping water from the lake, cupping it in my hand and letting it fall, watching as it rolls off my legs.
Ulrik stays with me for a while by the water. He tells me about his 12-year-old daughter, and how they go camping together in the woods, how much she makes him laugh. He talks about the difficult choices in his life, a question of personal values over financial gain. I say less, but I listen.
After a while, we go back for another round of heating, sweating and letting go. It’s not surprising to me that Ulrik is talking about his family and the problems facing him in life. Sauna tends to strip people back and smooth their jagged edges, allowing for words to come out that might otherwise be swallowed.
There is a saying that the Finns are melancholic people, but at least in sauna, they can be melancholic together. The equality of the sauna as a place to talk, debate and connect is in part what contributes to Finland consistently being named the happiest country in the world. Ulrik’s problems are not mine, and I can easily leave them at the edge of my body, but he says it is helping him to talk to a stranger, someone who doesn’t have any weight in the fight.
I tell him about the saunas I am planning to visit; it is a long list, and he says the next time I need to go to the far north of the country, where families have Mökki, summer cabins, with old smoke – and wood-fired saunas in the forest and by lakes.
These are the cabins of previous generations, from a time before most of the population moved down to the country’s burgeoning cities. But public saunas are what I want to experience on this trip, so I let go of the guilt that I am not seeing everything, this time.
The next day, I head to Kotiharjun sauna, a community-block sauna in Helsinki’s downtown district of Kallio. It opened in the 1920s and has been run by the same family for 50 years. It is the oldest public sauna in Helsinki. Above its low door, a two-metre-long neon red sign spelling out S A U N A stands out against the muted colours of the terracotta buildings and lush greens of the surrounding park.
Behind a cubbyhole desk, a man with a grey-haired plait hanging down a Hawaiian-shirted back is reluctant to take my money. The women’s sauna at Kotiharjun is an electric one, while the men get the wood-fired one, and it is only open for another two hours. Usually, people come for five or six hours, he tells me, recommending I come back another day.
After some cajoling, he takes my ten-euro note and I’m allowed to put my water bottle in the communal chest fridge, which is crammed with cans of beer belonging to the men I can hear in the sauna above me. Drinking can be a big part of the sauna culture in Finland, seen by some as the essential accompaniment to sweating for its apparent ability to rehydrate a body, and for the love of it.
Up a poky stairs, I find the women’s changing rooms, dominated by faded chintz armchairs and lit by windows that only open a crack. All around me, I can hear the burble of men laughing and chatting together, and a shallow feeling of isolation settles in. As sweating culture in cities changed from public to private, with a sauna in every apartment block, women were relegated to electric stoves and reduced hours in the public saunas, and so fewer women come, leading to even worse conditions.
The women’s sauna in Kotiharjun is small and smells of stale sweat. After ten minutes, I rinse off in a cold shower and head downstairs to buy a beer from the tuck shop. Finding a perch outside, I sit opposite a line of men on a low wall, each of them bare-chested, drinking their own little beers. They are jabbering in Finnish, happy to be together. I’ve always loved being around people whose language I can’t speak, listening to the stream of sounds, visualising where words begin and meaning is meant. But despite the towels wrapped lazily around each man’s hips, it is an array of testicles facing me, and the wrinkled hairiness of it all overpowers my desire for a chat.
Retreating inside, I find someone standing, waiting for me. Wearing a full-length apron, with a cotton floral dress underneath, Maria tells me she is going to scrub me. I’ve run out of road for the sauna’s other offerings, so I follow her through a basement locker room into a 15-metre long shower room with concrete benches and white tiles. Maria gestures to an autopsy plinth covered in a plastic sheet at the end of the room, telling me to get on to it. With little enthusiasm, despite her kind smile, I hang up my towel.
Counting how many people in my life have seen me fully naked, I now add Maria to the list. The room is cold, and through the bars of a high window, I can just see the shoes and anklebones of people passing by on the street. It’s difficult to escape the feeling that this is what the washing-room of a low-security prison must be like.
Using a pink sponge, Maria rubs each of my limbs methodically with purple liquid soap, creating a foamy lather. There is no haste to her movements, and she tells me she has been working here for 50 years, ever since her family bought the place.
‘People love this,’ she says, raising my hand to scrub the inside of my armpit, ‘especially the men. I am like grandmother.’ I believe her, but the cold of the tiled room is overriding any sense of comfort otherwise derived from another person washing me. Once Maria rinses me down, having shampooed my hair while I sat naked on a plastic chair, arms wrapped around my body for warmth, she tells me I can get dressed or go back to the sauna. It’s an easy decision, and I am out of the building and away from the men still happily drinking and chatting outside, within minutes.
Rosanna Cooney is a journalist, podcaster and producer. Her new book, Sweathouse, is published by Irelandia Press.
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