Across the world, people have come up with a variety of ways to keep clean, from the humble bucket bath familiar to Peace Corps Volunteers across Africa to fancy shower rooms and face masks of South Korea. In Kyrgyzstan, many are surprised to learn that most locals have adopted the Russian banya, a type of sauna, as the bathing solution of choice. But what exactly is a banya?
Banya, as you might have guessed from the sound of the word, derives from the same root as baño, bain, and bath. Banya (мончо in Kyrgyz) can mean a few different types of place, including a shared public bathhouse, a public bathhouse with many private rental areas, or a private facility within someone’s house. But they all share a few components in common.
First of all is an entrance room to change out of your street clothes into either a towel or less (for single-gender or one-person banyas). There’s usually lockers or cabinets and benches and such. Next, comes a water room, which in rural areas is an area with a spigot and buckets of water, and in fancier places has a heated showerhead. Finally, the back room is a piping hot sauna, kept hot by a heater that can be electric in the cities, but in rural areas is most often fed by a fire made of coal, wood, or trash. We sometimes joke that you can tell when it’s Saturday or Sunday in the village because you can smell people burning plastic and other trash to heat their banyas.
The banya is an adventure the first few times you go. The basic procedure is that you go sit in the sauna for 10-20 minutes until you can’t stand the heat anymore (it’s about 90 degrees centigrade, and you put water on the hot stones to raise the humidity), then you go out and douse yourself in water (ideally cold) to wash the sweat away. Then you take a break in the entrance room, then do it again two more times. On the second trip into the sauna, you use branches from various trees to slap yourself (or others will do it for you) to exfoliate and stimulate circulation). After three or four sweats, your skin feels completely purged of anything that was in your pores, and you can shower down and get dressed.
The banya isn’t just about hygiene, relaxing your muscles, and purging your pores; it’s also an exceptionally social event for most. The entrance chamber where people rest between trips into the sauna often has food, tea, beer, and vodka, and many use their weekly trip to the banya with friends to socialize and drink. Despite widespread warnings to not drink before a hot tub or trip to the sauna, it seems here that a banya is not complete without several shots of vodka! One need look no further than the well-known New Year film The Irony Of Fate (Or, Enjoy Your Bath!) to see how prevalent the social aspect extends into Soviet popular culture – the film’s entire plot hinges on the main characters getting completely wasted at the banya!
Since I have a shower at my house, I’ve actually only been to the banya once, when a bunch of us went skiing tubing and then went to the banya afterward. Some banyas are a collection of private banyas in a single building, so the ten of us had a private set of entry/relaxing room, shower room, and sauna, which is actually the only way you can have a mixed-gender group together in a public banya. But, as many of my colleagues can attest, there are few cleaner feelings than that after two hours of steaming every last impurity out of your skin.
I’m looking forward to visiting one of the Russian baths in London next year, or finding a gym with a good sauna in it to be able to steam clean a bit more frequently. There’s really nothing like it!
(Slight note on vocabulary: bathhouse might be a better translation than either banya or sauna… In talking with many people, it seems that the Russian words “banya” and “sauna” have different meanings in different places, sometimes connotating slightly…different activities, not always related to getting clean. So, it’s good to check!).