FINNISH SAUNA (Suomalainen sauna)

The Finns go back thousands of years to central Asia when nomadic tribes began their migration eastward and northward, to populate southwestern Russia, Slovakia, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, and finally Suomi, as they call their land.

ORIGIN OF THE SAUNA

When BC met AD the itinerant Finns were establishing fur trade with Central Europe and gave up their wandering ways. As their numbers increased, they moved inland, turning to the soil for sustenance. Anthropologists know little about the Finns before the Middle Ages; therefore, the origin of the sauna is in question. Have they always had some form of sweat bath? Were they the progenitors of sweat bathing across Europe and Asia? Did they share the idea with American Indians before they crossed the Bering Straits? Most researchers agree that Finns always had some form of sweat bath, as did most peoples around the world. It was the simplest and most efficient way to satisfy people's innate need to keep clean. When the Finns were nomadic, they probably used a portable sweat lodge similar to those carried by the American Indian and still seen among nomadic tribes in central Asia. Once the Finns settled, they may have erected underground sweat houses, forerunners of the savusauna.

FOREIGN INTEREST

Until the 16th century, Finnish bathing habits went virtually unrecorded. During the Middle Ages sweat bathing was popular throughout Europe. Finland was merely a quiet buffer between the Swedish and Russian empires and had little cultural influence in Europe. The sauna was, therefore, inconspicuous. The Finnish sauna's profile began to grow when the Reformation made the European bath house almost extinct. Only did Finnish, Russian and Scandinavian peoples continue their traditions of sweat bathing. In the 1500s Klaus Magnus wrote: Nowhere on earth is the use of the bath so necessary, as it is in the Northern lands. There you find both private and public baths extremely well equipped. Private baths belong to highly placed persons and are built in the vicinity of fresh running water and beautiful gardens and herbs. Public baths are built in towns and villages and in such a large quantity as the number of people living there make necessary. It is not as Poggio claims in a letter to Leonardo Aretino: that naked people of both sexes meet with inappropriate notions. He probably means the people in northern Germany, especially near the Baden area, who are rather loose with their morals. Among these people there are some who are so loose and degenerate in the hot baths that they even drink and sleep and allow themselves all kinds of evil and other foolishness in the baths. If such immodest creatures were found with their customs in Nordic bathing places, they would immediately be carried out and thrown into the deep winter snow drifts with the risk of being smothered. In the summer they would be thrown in ice cold water and left some time without food.

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