Everybody likes to have some time to relax, but some nations have made relaxation a national pastime. In Japan, the weekend or holiday season is an opportunity to take in a hot spring. Dotted all over the country, these onsen provide the perfect getaway to rejuvenate body and mind. For foreign visitors to the country, the temperatures may be too much to bear for more than a short period of time. The Japanese, however, are brought up with hot springs and can pass an entire afternoon hopping in and out of them.
In the same way, then, the Finnish have made the sauna their activity of choice for relaxation. Sauna is a Finnish word which refers to the bath-house or bath, itself. As the UK journal Discovery explained perfectly in 1936: “A speciality of Finland which everyone who visits the country ought to try is the Sauna—the special steam-baths which Finnish people from time immemorial have been in the habit of taking”.
Saunas have been around for a long time and, in Finland at least, they started life as a simple pit in the ground with a fireplace. Water was thrown onto stones in the fireplace to create steam and produce an intense heat. Variations of the Finnish sauna, however, can be found in the indigenous cultures of Mexico and Central America and possible ancient sauna sites have been uncovered in Greenland and Newfoundland.
The word sauna first appeared in English print in 1881. In Land of the Midnight Sun, Paul B. Du Chaillu wrote: “One of the most characteristic institutions of the country is the Sauna (bath-house), called Badstuga in Swedish”. And so, sauna entered into English print and the British began to enjoy the experience of sweating naked in a hot room.
I asked our resident Swede at EVS Translations about the sauna culture and his response was this: “Oh, saunas are a Finnish thing. Don’t ever go to a sauna with a Fin. It’s like trying to arm wrestle with someone—they won’t be beaten. The sauna will be hotter than you can cope with and they’ll be sure to ‘out-sauna’ everyone in there”. It seems that in Finland, staying in the sauna longer than everyone else, at the highest temperatures, is a matter of pride and a show of strength. Even the Sauna World Championships were banned in 2010, after a 10-year run, because people were starting to die (which was unfortunate for Germany, because that was the year they had their first female world champion, Michaela Butz).
Art Buchwald, a regular columnist for The Washington Post, summed up the Finnish sauna in his 1957 book I chose Caviar with his dubious comment: “But in Finland a sauna is not just a bath—it is a way of life. A sauna is to a Finn what a pub is to a Britisher, what a café is to a Frenchman, what a television set is to an American”.
