By Luke Waterson
‘Other countries have saunas, but nowhere has sauna culture like here in Finland. Elsewhere it’s a business model: in Finland it’s a way of life,’ says Alexander Markus Lembke, sitting in the yard outside the sauna where he works in Tampere, the Nordic nation’s second city and self-proclaimed ‘sauna capital of the world.’
There are a staggering 60-odd saunas scattered across the Tampere metropolitan area but most, like this one, Rajaportti – strangely perhaps to outsiders who generally associate saunas with the luxurious spa retreats where they are most commonly found in other parts of Europe and North America – are quite modest affairs. Here, in a squat, unadorned building where entrance fees are collected without ceremony at a hatch, the pomp and priciness of much Western wellness is refreshingly absent.
‘I think of myself as a sauna classicist,’ confides Lembke, who is also available for hire as a guide to novices unfamiliar with Finnish sauna etiquette. ‘A real sauna is very different to how the concept has been interpreted in other places, and I want to show people that. Rajaportti is in a working-class district, you could be anyone coming in here, rich or poor, and when you do you’re all equal. The most shocking aspect for those coming to a Finnish sauna from the UK, or the US, is that everyone is naked. No clothes. Remove clothes and you take away miscommunication. In saunas here you encounter all body shapes and sizes, fat, thin, the old, the young, little ones of just a few weeks old, all equal, all relaxing and sweating. It’s a healthy thing for society.’
And the sauna, when its origins are traced back, is a humble thing indeed. Likely, according to Lembke, saunas developed with the nomadic peoples that travelled across the Finnish countryside several millennia ago. When overnight shelter was erected, it would have been a wooden tipi-like frame with hide stretched around, to house both humans and the animals they herded. Lighting a fire within was the sensible way to smoke out the space of bugs and ensure it was as hygienic as possible. So renowned did saunas become for their cleanliness that up until the 1940s, Finnish women would give birth in them, while traditionally brides would use the steamy spots for a symbolic pre-marriage cleanse. No wonder, then, that to this day tradition also dictates that the sauna should be the first room completed in a new home. In Finland, there is no precedent for saunas being places for the privileged on special occasions: they have always existed to serve all people’s needs, on a day-to-day basis.
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Once disrobed and inside, it’s all about the steam. Lembke’s role at Rajaportti is as saunan lämmittäjä (sauna heater), an art that he assures me is so complicated to perfect that it is considered a highly regarded job. For although electric saunas exist in Finland, self-respecting Finns would only ever use a wood-heated sauna to truly unwind. This is fired up by means of a stove, usually utilising birch twigs but also mixed-wood twigs and larger logs, to create a blaze that heats stones, in Rajaportti’s case over one ton’s worth, until they glow. Water is then doused on the stones, which removes carbon monoxide and instigates waves of steam to waft around the sauna space.
‘This is where it gets lost in translation,’ smiles Lembke, ‘because Finns call the water and the steam löyly: this is the spirit of the sauna. It’s what every sauna-goer most wants. It’s not just a physical thing that’s good for muscles or the mind, it goes deeper, into your soul. I do löyly tastings, just like people do whisky tastings, and there can be average and excellent, like a blend versus a single malt. The quality of the löyly absolutely makes the sauna experience. And it’s challenging to make perfect löyly because there are many variables: the outside air temperature, wind speed, the combination of wood used.’
‘And there are no rules,’ he adds. ‘How often the löyly circulates around the room is done by feel. Sauna bathers know when it’s right. The same with the temperature, some merchandise says 80°C, but the heat varies according to the different parts of the sauna, so for me 75-100°C is the range. Yet some of my best sauna experiences have been way hotter too.’
Sauna nirvana is a similarly difficult concept to define. But it revolves around what the Finns term Lämpömassa. This translates as thermal mass, the perfect balance between heat and humidity, evocatively summarised by the Sauna Times as when ‘the heat envelopes and surrounds us, while at the same time, the heat penetrates through our bodies evenly, gracefully and intensely.’
‘People have forgotten how to listen to their body,’ Lembke reflects. ‘The sauna is about getting them to remember again. The same applies when you feel you’ve had enough. Leave when your body tells you: the only thing forbidden inside is your mobile phone, so you’ll only have your body to listen to!’
Saunas seem to be better for you the more you frequent them, too. Studies have linked increased weekly sauna visits with a significantly lower likelihood of getting dementia, while many postulate that regular sauna sessions alleviate chronic pain and galvanise the immune system. Improved circulation is also cited as a benefit: Finnish sauna-goers will often kick-start this by a chilly dunk in the lake alongside which many saunas are located, and by beginning a gentle beating of themselves – or others amenable to the idea – with a birch whisk called a vasta after the löyly starts spreading.
Lembke has spent years researching sauna culture, writing articles on it, and producing photography exhibitions on it. My journey after meeting him would reveal how much I still had to learn on the topic.
I would visit saunas in a lakeside lumberjack’s lodge in Kuopio, billed as the world’s largest smoke sauna and capacious enough within to accommodate business conferences, and below a Lapland fell in Kilopää, where the sauna-going was followed with a plunge into an avanto (ice hole) backed by forests that stretched away to the Russian border. But it would be the oldest still-functioning sauna the country has, the unassuming mustard-hued complex at Rajaportti, that would teach me most about Finnish saunas: baring all alongside a mixed bag of body shapes in a working-class neighbourhood of Tampere.
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Editorial submission – 16th January 2024
