Cathedrals of the Flesh by Alexia Brue

Author:Alexia Brue
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

finland:

saunatopia

There is nothing that Finns have been so unanimous about as their sauna. This unanimity has remained unbroken for centuries and is sure to continue as long as there are children born in their native land, as long as the invitation still comes from the porch threshold in the evening twilight: 'The sauna is ready.'

- Maila Talvio, 1871-1951

[V]oluntarily they torment themselves, acquiring pain instead of cleanliness.

— Nestor of Kiev, writing about Finnish saunas in 1113

I boarded the Russian Repin, an old Soviet train, for the six-hour ride from St Petersburg to Helsinki. The crisp, sunny early August weather seemed to mirror my destination: Lutheran sauna country. 'How was Petersburg?' asked an English family on the train. They had ridden overnight from Helsinki but had been denied access into Russia because of incomplete visa paperwork.

'Even better than Anna Karenina' I said, already missing the tarnished sparkle and mysterious happenings of St Petersburg. 'How was Helsinki?' I asked in return.

'Rather too perfect, really,' the mother replied in clipped Oxford English. A prophetic comment, as it turned out.

I had my own compartment for most of the ride. Watching the forests roll by, I calculated how many veynik could be made from each swath of forest. This grove of birch would yield at least three hundred veynik, five from that one tree alone. Responsible deforestation — veyniks require only a few leafy outer branches —all in the name of a good banya. I'd heard the Finns used veynik, too, but they called them vastas or vihtas, depending on whether you're in the east or west. I thought about Irina, en route to a writers retreat in Optima, no doubt soon to be terrorizing the nuns in the abbey. In the end, she had shown herself to be a true mensch.

I tried to picture my boyfriend, Charles, whom I hadn't seen since a week-long stopover in Budapest two months earlier. As the Repin chugged west through the seemingly pristine Russian countryside, on the other side of the world Charles was probably snapping pictures of shy starlets. That was his job, and being a celebrity photographer required a rare blend of social and technical skills. His effortless stream of provocation and self-effacing humor produced marvelous responses and spontaneous pictures.

Charles loved the baths of Budapest and had wanted us to visit them together. He is at his happiest soaking up to his chin in water, and we passed many languid summer days sampling the ubiquitous hot spring baths on the Buda side and looking at Roman and Ottoman ruins (my obsession). But Budapest scored low on bathing culture because the atmosphere in the baths was more German Kur than New Rome. The German, Czech, and Hungarian brand of rejuvenation involves enemas, medical massages, and carbon dioxide treatments in which a rubber bag is cinched tight around your waist and filled with C02 . Talk about the placebo effect. While some of the Buda baths were tucked away in architecturally interesting places and had a romantic old world grittiness, these are not joyful places to be.

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