What Finns actually say in the sauna, in order

Somebody climbs onto the top bench, picks up the ladle, and asks the room a two-word question before doing anything with it.

• Saaks heittää?
  Is it OK to throw?
• Heitä vaan.
  Go ahead.

You will hear it in any sauna you share with somebody. The English-language guides cover the behaviour: shower first, sit on a towel, do not stare. They do not cover the talking.

The sequence, door to last löyly

The order below is the ordinary one in a shared or public sauna. Alone in your own, or during your building’s booked hour, none of it happens. The forms are the Helsinki ones; a Tampere or Oulu bench sounds different in the details and identical in the sequence.

1. 1
   Changing room

   Moi. or Terve. At a traditional public sauna you do greet, because there are eight of you in a small room and you are about to sit next to each other. In a swimming-hall or gym sauna, nobody greets anybody.
2. 2
   Finding a place on the bench

   Onks tilaa? Is there room. Nobody owns a spot and nobody has to move for a regular, so this is a courtesy rather than a request.
3. 3
   The door

   Ovi kii! Shut the door. Said flatly and at volume, to anyone, including you. It is about the heat leaving and it carries no irritation.
4. 4
   Before the first water

   Saaks heittää? The one that matters. Voiks heittää? does the same job. Small ladlefuls after that, and the Finnish Sauna Society's chair calls emptying a whole bucket at once something that has no place in sauna bathing.
5. 5
   And again, a few minutes later

   Heitänks lisää? Shall I throw more. The asking repeats. Society guidance is to check with the others at intervals, not once at the start.
6. 6
   The compliment

   Hyvät löylyt. Plural. This is the line to arrive with.
7. 7
   Going out to cool

   Mä meen vilvottelee. I am going to cool off. The yard outside a public sauna is a vilvoittelupiha, and it is where most of the talking happens.
8. 8
   Leaving for good

   Kiitos löylyistä. Thanks for the löyly, plural again. It goes to whoever heated the sauna, so it belongs at a mökki or a private sauna rather than on the way out of a public one, where there is nobody to thank.

Every line there is shorter than the version a course gives you, and shorter in the same way.

Four of the six are questions, and not one of them carries the -ko/-kö ending a course teaches you to listen for. That collapse is one of a small set of regular changes between written and spoken Finnish, and on a sauna bench it means the difference between an offer and an instruction is carried entirely by the tone.

Two lines are plural, and each has an owner

Löyly is the burst of steam that comes off the stones when water hits them. Look it up and you get a singular headword, so an English speaker reasonably produces hyvä löyly, which describes the steam rather than praising it.

In this idiom the word is plural. Hyvät löylyt. Tampere’s Rajaportti, the oldest public sauna still working in Finland, uses nothing else in its own copy: hyvien löylyjen ystävät, friends of good löyly, and maan parhaat ja pehmeimmät löylyt, the country’s best and softest.¹ Its page also gives you the two dials people actually adjust between - töpäkämmät or miedommat, harder or milder.

On the way out there is Kiitos löylyistä, elative plural, and it is thanks aimed at whoever heated the sauna. At a mökki you say it to your host. Walking out of Kotiharju you say hei hei or nothing, because there is no one it belongs to.

The one you are most likely to have said to you is the third, and no guide carries it: Hyviä löylyjä! Partitive plural, said to somebody heading in while you are heading out.

Kotus lists löyly. The bench says löylyt, coming in and going out, and never the headword.

Nobody has to be quiet

The most repeated claim in English about the Finnish sauna is that it is a silent, near-religious space. Hannu Saintula, who chairs the Finnish Sauna Society, contradicts the rule rather than the quiet: in a public sauna you cannot require other bathers to be silent, because conversation is an essential part of what public sauna bathing is.²

Two pieces of evidence sit either side of that. Rajaportti runs a hiljainen sauna, a silent sauna, on the last Wednesday of every month, with talking moved outside to the yard and the cafe. It has to be programmed. That tells you what the ordinary days sound like. And Kotiharju in Kallio advertises the talking as part of the product: the bench stories, and the cooling off outside while watching the street.

None of that makes it a talkative room. A bench of strangers is very often quiet, the löyly itself usually lands in silence, and nobody owes anybody a word. The accurate version is narrower and more useful: silence is not required and it is not rude, and neither is talking.

If you want to find out whether you would follow the bench, the sauna quiz runs six of these lines in the form they are actually said.

What is true is that three topics stay out. Politics, religion, and detailed work business.² The reasoning is practical. The bench holds strangers who cannot leave quickly and who are mostly not wearing anything, so the conversation has to be one that everybody present can join.

Nobody has counted the saunas

The number in every article, including on the UNESCO listing itself, is that Finland has 3.3 million saunas for 5.5 million people.³ The Finnish Heritage Agency, writing about the same inscription in the same month, says 3.2 million.⁴

Both descend from one source: a bulletin in the magazine Sauna 4/2010, issued under the name of the architect Pekka Tommila, giving roughly 3,200,000. Tommila died in 2013 and the method behind the figure was never published. Lassi Liikkanen, who went looking for it, could not get it from the Sauna Society either.⁵

Against that, Statistics Finland’s own information service produced a figure from the building register: 1,964,000, adding up detached houses, flats with saunas, blocks with a house sauna, summer cottages and free-standing sauna buildings. Liikkanen’s own reconstruction landed at 2.66 million, later revised to about 2.8 million after a rival count from Oulu came in higher.

The Sauna Society’s previous published count, in the same magazine in 1994, was 1,592,079 saunas for 1992. Doubling in eighteen years is not what happened to Finnish housing.

The companion claim goes with it. “More saunas than cars” comes from the same 2010 bulletin. Finland had over 3.1 million road-legal vehicles by mid-2017, plus another 800,000 off-road, so there are comfortably more cars.

None of which makes the sauna less central. About 90 per cent of Finns go at least once a week, the country logs over 200 million individual sauna visits a year, and the first one happens before the age of six months.⁶ The count that is unreliable is the count of rooms.

If the sauna is in your building

Most people in Finnish cities do not have their own. They have a saunavuoro, a booked turn in the building’s shared sauna, and the terms are set before you ask for one.

At Heka, Helsinki’s municipal landlord, the slot is one hour, it recurs weekly, it is charged on the rent, and you cannot book a half slot, a fortnightly slot or a one-off.⁷ It is the weekly turn or nothing. Other housing companies do offer alternate weeks, so the rule to check is your own building’s. Some post the booking calendar on the sauna door and nowhere else; some route bookings through the maintenance company instead of the landlord; some ban whisks; nearly all require a seat cover.

The same question works on a person instead of a room.

• Mun saunavuoro on torstaina seittemältä.
  My sauna slot is Thursday at seven.
• Mennäänks saunaan?
  Shall we go to the sauna?

And afterwards, a beer: kippis. At a mökki it comes onto the bench with you. At a public sauna it waits in the yard, because most of them will not let you carry it in.