Every Finnish embassy has a sauna, and nobody has to ask

Urho Kekkonen put Nikita Khrushchev in a sauna and raised the question of Finland joining the European Free Trade Association while they were in it. Vyacheslav Molotov is reported to have given Khrushchev a hard time about it afterwards, on the grounds that he had got naked with a foreigner, and a non-communist at that.¹ The story is told without a firm date attached, which is worth knowing before repeating it.

The story is told in Finland as a joke and filed abroad as an anecdote. It is neither. It is the clearest surviving description of a method the foreign ministry still uses, and the method has a Finnish verb attached to it that English cannot translate in one word.

Saunoa and saunottaa

Saunoa is to take a sauna. It is an ordinary intransitive verb and English has to rent a noun to say it: to have a sauna, to take a sauna, to go to the sauna.

Saunottaa is the causative, and its home ground is looking after somebody: its ordinary objects are children, elderly relatives and guests. It means to put somebody else through a sauna, and it is built with the commonest of Finnish’s causative suffixes, -tta-.

Finnish builds causatives this way for anything, not just for saunas. A diplomat hosting a sauna is not taking one, grammatically. They are doing it to a guest, and the language has a noun for that role.

The room comes with the building

Reporting on the practice describes every Finnish embassy, consulate and official residence as being fitted with a sauna.² It is not a request a particular ambassador makes. The room is part of what a Finnish mission is, in the same way a flag and a reception room are.

Sanna Kangasharju, a press counsellor in Washington, put the purpose plainly: “I often say that the sauna societies are our best diplomatic weapon.”²

Her colleague Pasi Rajala gave the other half, the one Finns recognise: “The sauna, it’s very integrated into our Finnish culture, so for us, it’s very normal. I’m personally surprised by how excited Americans are by this.”¹

Washington, three saunas in the basement

The embassy in Washington keeps three of them downstairs and runs the Diplomatic Sauna Society, in its current form since 2008.¹ Up to 25 journalists, think-tank researchers and congressional staffers come to a session, monthly, on both sides of American politics.²

A Finnish block of flats runs its shared sauna on a saunavuoro, a booked hour on a fixed weekday. An embassy sauna is the same object with a different door policy: the hour is held and the list is drawn up by a press counsellor.

1. 1
   It is invitation-based and oversubscribed

   Demand for places has been reported as well beyond what the three rooms hold. Being hard to get into is itself the result the format is aiming at.
2. 2
   Nothing is agreed in the room

   The output is familiarity. Nothing gets written down, and people who have shared a bench do not open a later phone call from scratch.
3. 3
   The arguing rule is real

   The convention Finns describe is that you do not argue in a sauna and everyone leaves on good terms. It is the constraint that makes the room usable for people who disagree professionally.

It is now an academic subject

Bradley Reynolds, at the University of Helsinki, published a study of the practice in Cooperation and Conflict in 2025, arguing that Finland has used the sauna to change how the sauna itself is read internationally, and that this amounts to a challenge to conventional diplomatic culture.³

Reynolds’s point is that the sauna was not a prestigious object abroad to begin with. Finland installed its most domestic room in every mission and moved it from exotic to desirable over several decades. The word travelled with it and almost none of the vocabulary around it did.

• Saunotetaan ne ensin.
  Let's put them through a sauna first.
• Asia hoitui saunassa.
  The matter got sorted in the sauna.

Finns say asia hoitui saunassa about construction contracts and union negotiations, not only about embassies. It is also a sentence that describes 1987 better than it describes 2026: the corporate sauna now does client hospitality and team-building far more than it decides anything. What has not changed is that nobody involved finds the room unusual.

The word went and the vocabulary stayed

Sauna is the Finnish word with the widest international reach. It is in English, German, Japanese, Russian and most other languages a Finnish mission operates in, and it got there without a campaign.

What did not travel is the verbs. English borrowed the noun and stopped, so there is no English word for taking a sauna and none at all for giving somebody one.

Löyly and kiuas did not travel either, and the sauna hub carries that vocabulary in full. The pronunciation is the part Finns notice. English says the first vowel as in “saw”, Finnish says it as two vowels run together, and the version a Finnish diplomat hears at a reception in Washington is not the word they brought.

English took the room and left both verbs behind, so a Washington invitation list is doing by hand what the word never carried: teaching people what you do in there.

Where the etiquette comes in

A guest at one of these is in a normal Finnish sauna with normal Finnish expectations, and nothing about the setting relaxes them. The rules that are actually enforced are in the sauna etiquette post, and what people actually say on the bench is in the phrases one.

The one addition is the arguing rule, and it is literal. A guest who uses the heat to press a point gets a bench full of people waiting for him to stop.