Rows of jetties line the shores of Ruissalo, one of thousands of islands in Finland’s Turku archipelago. Many jetties leads to a wood-fired sauna hut, a junior version of the grand, 18th-century waterside villa nearby. In high summer, the silence is broken by the growl of distant ferries, the sloshing of backwash and the squeals of residents as they plunge into the Baltic.
No Nordic nation takes saunas as seriously as Finland, where private home saunas are far from a luxury. Mostly, they are regarded as essential.
“I get my best and clearest ideas in my sauna,” says Sanna Suomi, owner of Villa Kuuva, a Ruissalo villa built in 1850, painted gingery yellow, with stained-glass Gothic windows, lace woodwork and a standalone sauna hut next to the sea, hand-built to match. “It is said that the best decisions are made there.”
There are an estimated 3.3mn saunas here for a population of 5.5mn — one for every 1.5 citizens, according to The Finnish Sauna Society. Neighbouring Sweden, population 10.5mn, has just 300,000.
Some are public and about a third of home saunas are wood-fired, like those on Ruissalo. But most of the rest are electric home models, which guzzle energy. A home sauna session typically uses 8-16 kWh, according to Motiva, a state-owned company charged with promoting sustainable energy.
The Finnish government attempted to ease home-sauna strain on the national power supply in 2022-23, with a campaign encouraging Finns to use them less often, or to spend less time in them. The campaign followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent halting of gas supplies to Finland.
Some Finns modified their habit. But few were prepared to give up their private saunas altogether — even in a national crisis.
“In Finland, no one is going to be told they can’t light [their home sauna],” says Emma O’Kelly, author of Sauna: The Power of Deep Heat, a book about traditions across the Nordics. “A private sauna is the benchmark by which all saunas are judged.”
Finnish domestic saunas are something close to sacrosanct, especially in the delirium of high summer when the sun barely sets and average temperatures reach 20C. The Turku archipelago is just over 400 miles from the Arctic Circle. A home sauna offers refuge from endless light.
Sauna bathing — full-body heat immersion followed by cold water, a cycle often repeated for hours — is believed to be thousands of years old. Finland’s tradition was added to Unesco’s list of intangible cultural heritage in 2020. Even the official presidential summer residence, also on the Turku archipelago, is kitted out with a generous presidential sauna.
At this time of year, Suomi fires up her sauna four times a week. “We go with friends, sometimes in a party mood,” she says. “But the most relaxing is by myself, then sitting by the water as the winds calm down, the water is still and just listening to silence.”
She may prefer her wood-fired hut by the sea, but her villa is also equipped with an electric sauna for winter, when average temperatures reach -7C.
Helsinki, the Finnish capital about 100 miles to the east, has lots of public saunas, many of them stylish hang-outs complete with bars and restaurants teeming with younger residents late into the evening. But Turku, Finland’s sixth-biggest city, has barely any, so popular is home use here.
“I can’t imagine life without a sauna,” says Hannele Heikkinen, 74, a Turku resident who has lived in houses with saunas since childhood, and whose complexion is almost supernaturally radiant.
Heikkinen and her husband Timo own three. One is electric, a wooden chamber lit by candles and housed next to the washing machine in the couple’s high-rise city apartment. There are two more in their summer house on the archipelago. “I spent a year in the Middle East without a sauna,” she says, frowning. “It was hard.”
Women are sometimes reluctant to use public saunas “because they can be male dominated”, says O’Kelly. “Some men pour steam on the rocks aggressively and it can all get a bit macho.”
Turku is planning to build a public sauna as a gift to its citizens to mark the city’s 800th birthday in 2029, and a private operator has proposed another chic, new sauna bar next to the Aura river, a stone’s throw from the Heikkinens’ apartment.
Would Heikkinen use it? “No, no. Never. It’s not the same.”
“How could I explain it?” she says of her private ritual. “After the sauna I am clean. Purified. And in summer there is magic.”
Finnish home saunas are infused with folklore, perhaps because of their long associations with healing and new life (before pharmaceuticals they offered sterility — babies were often born in them). The meditative, almost trippy powers of alternating between being extremely hot then extremely cold temperatures help, too.
Superstition is everywhere. Summer brides run around the sauna naked on the eve of their wedding to chase away the memories of ex-boyfriends, or read their names aloud as water is thrown on coals to symbolise their extinguishing from memory.
Even more mystical is the belief that every sauna is patrolled by a semi-belligerent spirit, often described as an elf, when humans are asleep.
Energy prices have stabilised in Finland since the government’s domestic energy crisis campaign — at least for now. Motiva says the campaign to encourage home sauna moderation is no longer needed, partly down to efforts to replace natural gas with nuclear power and renewables such as hydroelectricity.
Back at the huts on the shores of Ruissalo, daylight is fading — though darkness never quite falls. Suomi says it will soon be time to leave a bottle of beer and a barbecued sausage outside her sauna hut as offerings to appease her elf.
What might happen otherwise? “The elf might burn the sauna down,” she says. She seems to half believe it.
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