Finns aren’t what they seem when you’re sharing their sauna
FINNS are often thought of as a stoic and taciturn bunch. Yet get them disrobed and into a sauna and suddenly they’re as garrulous as a London cabbie.
‘Do you know what is the difference between smoke and wood sauna?’ a gravelly voiced Finn asked a pair of perspiring Americans in the soot-walled smoke sauna at Löyly – a new public sauna opened last year in Helsinki.
‘In wood sauna, the fire heats the stones but the smoke goes away in the chimney. In a smoke sauna, the fire heats the stones and we are in the chimney.’
Breathing in the searing and moist mucky air, I concurred: we were most definitely in the chimney.
Public saunas in Helsinki were once ubiquitous; but a post-war housing boom saw many of them replaced by apartment blocks with their own private saunas. Recently, though, a new breed of public saunas has arrived in the Finnish capital, with two of the most popular recent additions being Löyly and Lonna.
A sprawling, recreational complex perched on Helsinki’s shoreline, Löyly is housed in an undulating, eco-friendly building and features a restaurant, large outdoor patio, a dock from which to jump into the Baltic Sea, and three saunas: wood, smoke, and a private-hire wood sauna for up to ten people.
Löyly (a word about as difficult to define as it is to pronounce) roughly translates as the heat provided after water is poured on sauna stones – not the resulting steam, exactly, but how the steam feels.
Atypical for Finnish saunas, Löyly is co-ed, so swimming costumes are mandatory.
But not everyone is into the idea of a mixed-gender sauna. ‘Finnish men don’t like it when there are women in their saunas. It’s their sacred place,’ driver Petteri Tamminen told me en route to Löyly.
‘If there are naked women, men are, like, “Why?” ’ He added: ‘But with towel, it’s OK.’
Like pretty much any Finn, my driver Mr Tamminen is an expert in sauna culture.
For a more traditional, laidback and bucolic atmosphere, head to Lonna, a ten-minute ferry ride from Helsinki’s market square. Housed on a small island, formerly a military base for decommissioning mines, Lonna is a bit smaller and less of a ‘scene’ than Löyly. It also has separate men’s and women’s saunas, and a co-ed deck from which you may saunter into the bracing sea.
At Lonna, I met three Helsinki locals who were testing out the facilities. They said they preferred it to Löyly, which Kimmo Riskala derided as ‘a bit like a party place’.
His friend Visa Kurki summed up Lonna dryly with a characteristically Finnish assessment: ‘I think it’s quite OK.’
After the sauna and requisite sea swim, I replenished myself with a piece of delicate Arctic char and a glass of a limited-run, impeccably crisp Gewurztraminer at Lonna’s casual, but exceptional upstairs restaurant – far more than OK in my book.