Saun(a) Time!

The sauna (or 'saun' in Estonian) is an important part of Estonian culture, but -- for obvious reasons -- visitors to Estonia often remain unaware of this fact. Most apartments here, including ours, have a built-in sauna, as do all hotels and apartment blocks, and even some restaurants! The Estonian saun is part of the Finnish sauna tradition. The basic elements appear in the picture above: heated coals (usually heated by electricity these days), benches to sit on, and a bucket of water and a ladle. Water is periodically scooped from the bucket and poured onto the hot coals. This produces an invisible cloud of steam which makes things a lot hotter for half a minute or so.

I've used our apartment sauna a couple of times, following instructions that I read on the Internet. The Finns and Estonians like their saunas hot (even by sauna standards), typically in the range of 70 to 100 degrees Celsius (i.e. between 160 and 212 Fahrenheit). According to the thermometer on the wall of our sauna, the second sauna I took reached around 170 Fahrenheit -- plenty hot for me.

Anyway, yesterday I gave a lecture to some professors and students in the Department of Mathematics in Tartu. It was my first time in their building so I was given a tour. Up on the 6th floor is a faculty lounge and adjoining the lounge is a sauna! Noting my interest, the professor who hosted my talk yesterday invited me to their weekly Mathematics Department sauna party. So it was that I headed across campus this afternoon carrying my towel and not knowing quite what to expect. I was excited because I knew from talking to people that being invited to take a sauna in Estonia is a big deal.

It turned out to be a very interesting cultural experience. People (it was an all male group) arrived at different times, undressed in an adjoining changing room and then headed into the sauna itself, which could fit up to four people at a time on its upper bench. Distinguished professors to whom I had been lecturing the day before were sitting around naked in the steamy haze. I'll leave you to imagine the scene. Suffice to say that it didn't look like this:


From time to time someone would throw more water on the coals. After a few minutes of sweating you would go out for a quick cold shower, wrap a towel around you and head out into the faculty lounge where beer and snacks were consumed. After drinking a while, and cooling down, you would head back in for another blast of sauna heat. I managed three rounds of the sauna-shower-beer rotation before calling it a night. It was a memorable occasion and I plan to go again at least once before I leave Estonia next month.

arb