The naked truth: inside Finland’s sauna culture
In the sauna there are no classes, professions and no signs of wealth. These levelling instincts are embedded in the very character of Finland.
On my first night in Helsinki I went looking for the secret to the Finnish character and found it in two words, both of which evoke nakedness. One is a characteristically Finnish compound noun: kalsarikannit. Sauna, also of Finnish origin, is the other.
I was at Helsinki harbourfront sauna-cum-restaurant named Löyly – meaning “sauna steam” – when told about kalsarikannit and its meaning was explained slowly, haltingly, over a beer: “It’s for those Saturday nights in the middle of winter when you just want to drink at home alone, in your underpants, with no intention of going out.”
Much later I was given a more distilled definition: “Underpants drunk”. I prefer the details in the long version because they form a word picture to which I can relate. Not only does kalsarikannit evoke a scene of uninhibited couldn’t-give-a-fig domesticity, it strips away social conventions to say something deeply human. Who doesn’t need a word for those kinds of nights!
The Finns endure a tough climate, blasted by snow in midwinter, by mosquito swarms in midsummer. But they boast the world’s best school system, an innovative design-led economy, a highly literate culture, and two stripped-bare social rituals.
As Finland regularly tops the list of the world’s happiest countries, the secret to its unlikely nordic bonhomie is often queried by psychologists and sociologists, and psycho-sociologists. But I think the answer lies in the Finnish taste for the unadorned self that is evoked by sauna and kalsarikannit. These levelling instincts – nakedness is the great solvent of social status – are embedded in the Finnish character.
A distinctive quality of Finnish sauna is the combination of the bared and the shared. At Uusi Sauna (New Sauna) on the docklands I found a mixture of steam room and, in the cooling-down area outside, a bar. This means, naturally, that most of the drinking is done in a state of near undress. A Finnish friend pointed out a couple on their first date: he was in a white towel; and she was swaddled in a white bathrobe.
The next morning I had an early appointment at Allas sea pool and sauna with sauna enthusiast Jaakko Blomberg. The Helsinki sauna culture, he explains, took a hit during Covid but has fired up again since. “In the 1940s, in Finland, there were about 140 public saunas. In 2015 there were just four. Now there are about 15 and plans for more. It’s something we seem to need.”
In summer the Allas Sea Pool, which bills itself as an urban oasis, is open for moonlight swims. I chose an early morning sauna on my winter visit followed by a bracing dash across the snow and a swim in the heated outdoor pool. Being a newbie I took my sauna towel poolside, only to find when I leapt out of the water that it was frozen solid. What should have been a leisurely stroll back to the sauna turned into a frantic dash.
There are 5.5 million Finns spread across a vast lake-speckled landmass and an estimated 3 million saunas: around one for every family. I was curious to know if sauna brought any tangible benefits to the harsh Nordic lifestyle, or was the hoo-ha about sauna just a lot of seriously hot air? The shock of the heat and the cold – for true sauna is accompanied by a dip in the ocean or at least a spell in a cold room – certainly gets a number of things pumping: adrenaline, endorphins and dopamine among them.
Listening to Jaakko Blomberg, it occurred to me that public saunas are antidotes to our anti-social social media. “In the sauna there are no classes, professions, no signs of wealth, you might talk to people you normally wouldn’t, because your paths wouldn’t cross,” he says. “It’s really refreshing to hear opinions of people I would never talk to. Also, it’s healthy to see all kinds of bodies. When we see just the bodies in movies, media and social media, we lose touch with what is normal.”
The selves we project through social media are mostly of our own creation. My Facebook profile is my ideal self; my Instagram world is one big holiday; my LinkedIn profile is a CEO-type version of my humble self. The result of this kaleidoscope of curated vanities sits somewhere between hyper reality and un-reality. In a Finnish public sauna there is nudity and there is nakedness, and the two are not the same. The latter has a more psychological register associated with stripping back and laying bare, with honesty, humanity, equality, and, dare I say it, truth. In the public sauna you are not a creature of your own creation; you are as you were created.
In the poem Song of Myself, Walt Whitman glorified the soulful goodness of this kind of unveiling: “I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,” he wrote. The poem’s central idea is that the unadorned self feels the deepest connection to others, and to nature. The researchers behind the happy country index point to things like feelings of mutual trust, communal support, along with faith in government and social institutions. But I think the Finnish talent for happiness – or at least the Finns’ resolute determination not to succumb to unhappiness – has something to do with the near universality of the sauna and the sentiment behind kalsarikannit. Nudity is a lark but nakedness is a rather profound idea. It’s connected with humility and common humanity; clothes, by contrast, flag our membership of clan, profession, tribe, caste. For those with a spiritual bent, to be sitting with a group of the unclothed is to be reminded of birth and death, our biological spring and winter. Existence itself. At one Helsinki sauna I spoke with a man built like a bear, with an enormous pelt of a beard. He was roasting meditatively on the upper tiers, looking like an ursine Buddha, when he told me that time in the sauna was time closer to God. And that’s the naked truth.
Helsinki
Stay: Hotel Lilla Roberts lillaroberts.com
Eat: Restaurant Sauna Loyly loylyhelsinki.fi/en
Do: Sauna! loylyhelsinki.fi/en; uusisauna.fi; allasseapool.fi