What is the History of Sauna ?
Sauna – A Finnish national institution
Written for Virtual Finland by Erkki Helamaa, architect, Professor emeritus and Juha Pentikäinen, Professor, University of Helsinki .
Finland is the land of the sauna and the Finns are a nation of sauna-enthusiasts. Finland has a population of 5.1 million and 1.7 million saunas — one for every three inhabitants. The sauna is considered an age-old Finnish feature, although it is not a Finnish invention and certainly not the private property of the Finns. In the late 19th century, sauna-bathing was practiced in the Old World all the way from the Baltic Sea to the Ural Mountains. The sauna was also common among the other Finnic nations in the Baltic region — the Estonians, the Karelians, the Veps and the Livonians. Other traditional sauna-users include many Slavic, Baltic (Latvians, Lithuanians) and eastern Finno-Ugric peoples as well as Turkic Tatars.
The traditional sauna is a wooden building where the bathers sit on benches splashing water on the hot stones of the stove and gently beating themselves with leafy birch whisks. ‘Sauna’, the most commonly borrowed Finnish word, has spread from Finnish to several world languages, although the Finns believe not always in its original sense. The expression ‘to have a sauna’ covers the whole bathing process and includes several repeated periods of perspiring in the heat and the steam, known as löyly, produced by the water thrown on the stones. Löyly is described as the spirit of the sauna. It is a Finno-Ugric word going back 7,000 years.
The Finns are not the only sauna-devotees in the world. Similar bathing houses and customs are also known among many other cultures (the Roman, Turkish and Celtic bath, the sweat lodge of the American Indians, the Japanese furo, the Russian banja, and the Mexican temascal). The Finns are, however, a special nation of sauna-users in the sense that they have kept the tradition alive and adjusted it to their modern lifestyle.
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