They Will Beat You With Birch Until You Feel Clean

If you come from a country that sells wellness in white towels, the Russian banya will look like a mistake. People sit in heat that a thermometer, when anyone bothers with one, may put near ninety degrees Celsius. They hit one another with wet birch. They run into snow. They drink kvass and go back in. The BBC’s Tatyana Leonov, writing from a family banya outside Yekaterinburg, watched relatives estimate the room at about average Russian heat and then dive into a drift. The point was not luxury. It was a Saturday that still knows how to end.

Kustodiev’s woman is plenty and wooden and unhurried. She is not a brochure. Roman K. Kovalev, in the Encyclopedia of Russian History, calls the banya a steam sauna or bathhouse that served as the primary form of hygiene, a source of pleasure, and a cure of maladies. He notes that the word is a Latin borrowing, from banea, while the traditional wooden bath had Finno-Ugrian origins. The earliest written mention he records is eleventh-century Novgorod; archaeologists have found wooden bani of that date in the city, and masonry baths in a Byzantine manner further south, in Pereyaslavl and Kiev, by the late eleventh century. Ethan Pollock, the Brown historian whose Without the Banya We Would Perish is the English book on the subject, told the BBC that Herodotus, around 440 BC, already described people north of the Black Sea throwing water on heated stones. That is a long ancestry to hang on a Saturday shed. It is not a reason to invent a single origin. The honest middle is Kovalev’s: a borrowed name, a northern wooden practice, a southern masonry cousin, and a habit foreigners could not stop describing.

In all towns and villages, they have many public and private baths, in which they [the Russians] may often be found.

Heat, twigs, then cold

Medieval and modern accounts, Kovalev writes, agree on the sequence. The body is exposed to high-heat vapours until it perspires heavily. People lash themselves with bundles of young branches, usually birch, soaked in boiling water: a massage, and an anointing with leaf oils. Then often a plunge into cold water or snow, and after that a wash with soap. Maria Vasekha, an ethnologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, told the BBC that the venik platza — the beating — is an art learned from parents, grandparents, or an expert in a public steam room, and that there are even competitions. Birch and oak are the usual woods; spruce, juniper, eucalyptus, and maple appear. You soak your own bundle. You do not mix it with a stranger’s. The leaf is intimate even when the room is not.

The cold after the heat is not a stunt for photographs. It is the hinge. The BBC records the folk physiology — a shock that the body may read as fever — without asking you to file it as a randomised trial. Pollock and Konstantin Kashin, in a paper on public health and bathing in late imperial Russia, listed the nineteenth-century medical enthusiasm: dozens of researchers tried to give the banya scientific backing against muscle pain, influenza, rheumatism, even syphilis and typhus. The same paper, and Leonov after it, is careful. Many of those studies lacked rigour. Some communal baths were dirty, overcrowded, and poorly ventilated, and likely spread disease. The mental fact is easier to keep: people come out feeling reset. A Russian saying Leonov prints is Помылся — будто заново родился: washed, as if born again. That is the clickbait, and it is also a proverb, which is how clickbait used to travel.

On the floor could be seen fifty bundles of rods rising and falling at the same time, the holders were whipping themselves into a state of intoxication. The steam became thicker and thicker every minute, so that what one now felt was not a warm but a burning sensation, as from boiling pitch.

Dostoevsky’s Omsk bath is the banya’s hell. A room twelve feet square, eighty or a hundred men, a kopeck to buy a place on a bench, scars standing out on backs the steam has turned red, Isaiah Fomitch howling on the top shelf and changing his rubber four times. The narrator tells Petroff that hell will remind them of this, and Petroff looks around and says nothing. Use the chapter as what it is: a prison washing, not a dacha Saturday. The twigs are the same object. The intoxication is the same word. The difference is whether you can leave.

A house, a street, a law

Kovalev distinguishes private and public bani; both still exist. Governments tried, repeatedly, to keep the sexes apart in the public ones: the Stoglav of 1551, Elizabeth in 1743, Catherine II in 1783. Some city baths, he writes, remained mixed into the early nineteenth century, with the only separation in the dressing rooms. The banya was warm and had water, so it was also a place for childbirth. Vasekha, in the BBC piece, adds the older social calendar: couples visited after a wedding; a groom might carry a bride over the banya threshold; mourners gathered there after a funeral so the dead would be warm enough for the road. Those rites have thinned. The Saturday has not. She notes that families once washed in the second half of Saturday, toward Sunday church, and that weekly sessions are still commonest on that day, in public rooms and at dachas.

Savrasov’s rooks are not a bathhouse. They belong here anyway: a wooden house, late snow, the week the body still knows ice. Pollock told the BBC that one of Catherine’s medical advisers declared a banya more beneficial than a doctor, and able to replace medicine in two-thirds of cases. Treat that as imperial advertising with a thermometer. Sanduny, Moscow’s best-known public palace of the habit, opened in 1808 under Sila Sandunov and was rebuilt, after later owners, for a February 1896 opening. The BBC calls it the city’s oldest functioning and most spectacular bathhouse, with separate rooms for men and women. A visitor can still buy the heat without owning a shed. The dacha version, Vasekha says, has no clock and a steam room one person can manage. The commercial version may hold sixty or eighty bodies and a staff to make the steam. The foundation is the same: steam-making, and the venik.

Not a spa

You may rent a felt hat, because hair and scalp burn. You may sit on a small mat. You shower before the twigs. You close the door of the parilka. You do not bring a cocktail menu into the fog and call it Russia. Leonov’s relatives sawed wood, tied birch, fed a fire, and then taught by demonstration. Vasekha still goes, in Moscow, on Saturdays with her husband and friends. The health claims of 1870 will not all survive a modern paper. The social claim will. The banya is a room in which a culture still agrees to be hot, naked or nearly, and briefly kind with a bunch of leaves. If someone offers to beat you, they are not insulting you. They are offering the oldest hospitality that does not happen at a table.