Smoke Sauna History and A Review of The Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
At our wedding dinner, my Scottish grandfather stood to raise a toast, ““Lang may yer lum reek!” In Old Scots, it means long may your chimney smoke. We who were born into the era of fossil fuel heating may not understand that smoke has a long history as a sign of something good–of warmth and the resources to survive. Chimneys also have a history. As I learn more about traditional sauna culture, I have been fascinated to learn that historically, a chimney was not the only way to manage smoke from a wood burning hearth. Learning about the smoke sauna: savusauna and smoke cottage: savutupa has been a revelation.
In Scandinavia, until as recently as the 19th Century, homes did not always have chimneys to vent the smoke out of the house. Finns, especially, were known to live in cottages known as savutupas. Usually a one room log cabin, it would be heated by a large masonry hearth standing at the center. Its smoke would be released directly into the room where it would rise and hover near the insulated ceiling warming every corner. As the fire burned out, the smoke would be directed by ventilation through a hole in the roof; the uuni, the stone oven, would retain its heat quite efficiently for hours. Such smoke cottages disappeared as chimneys were introduced and other aspects of modernization changed housing by the early 1900’s. Heating homes in this way faded from use and memory.
The same smoke-based heating principle has been applied to saunas for millennia. Not so long ago, all saunas were smoke saunas heated by ovens without chimneys. Today they are rare and have a reputation among enthusiasts as the holy grail, the most ancient, the most pure experience of sauna. Researcher and author Frank Eld has done important work documenting these buildings during his travels in North America and the Nordic countries. I learned so much hearing him speak on the subject of “Taking the Smoke Out of the Mystery of the Savusauna and the Savutupa.”
Understanding the history of savusauna will help one understand the title and setting of the 2023 Estonian movie The Smoke Sauna Sisterhood. The film was made in the historic region of Võrumaa where the tradition of smoke sauna has been added to the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The movie is a documentary about memory, survival and tending to heritage much as one tends to the slow fire of a smoke sauna; it is about honoring the ancestors and recognizing that their spirits abide in the eternally sacred sauna. It is also, and importantly, about women and women’s bodies and the refuge and power of sauna.
Over the course of changing seasons, a group of women, friends, gather in the smoke sauna and viewers witness their conversations and rituals. Director Anna Hints said in an interview that the filmmakers started with a rule–“we would not decide in advance what the discussions inside the sauna would be about. We were open to whatever emerged.” What comes up are very personal and difficult topics– body image, realtionships, giving birth, miscarriage, periods, violence and rape. Perhaps this is a natural result in a film where women are naked and at the same time free from a sexualizing, objectifying lens. It is a rare moment of freedom that stirs up deep feelings.
While the women’s stories predominate, there is more to the film. It is a portrait of smoke sauna practice in a place where its traditions have survived for many generations. The sauna in the film is a rustic, remote, multi-purpose building. Meat is smoked there. Preparing the sauna for bathing is an ancient custom that requires skill and the correct attitude. It takes hours to tend the fire and for smoke to fill and warm the space before being released through doors and windows. There is no plumbing, water must be drawn from a well or the nearby lake; branches for viht are cut and tied into bundles. The old customs continue as bathers greet the sauna itself upon entering with faith in its ability to cleanse body and mind.
In the film, the women seek strength and healing as they scrub their skin, sweat and rinse their bodies. An ancestral spirit appears at times in the film, a faint apparition in the clouds of a woman in rahvariided, the traditional “clothes of the people.” She tells stories about being a woman in another era. The film reaches a sort of crescendo as old songs are sung while feet stomp on the sauna’s wooden planks, pain is released and strength is generated through voices that join together. In the forest, smoke rises from the savusauna, an ancient reminder of our will to carry on.
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