When I first envision a banya, it looks something like this.

Humble. Weathered. Even ramshackle.

Traditional banyas often look like this because they have stood for years. Often they were built during periods of deficits in materials, and not by carpenters.

I like banyas like this for the same reason I like things that are made by hand. It is imperfect. It has character. Moreover, if it is still standing, it is still being used – which means it probably yields good steam.

This banya reflects a certain energy. It has dukh, or spirit.

While this banya looks old, it is not among the oldest. This one has a chimney – the biggest, and pretty much only, advancement in banya design – whereas the earliest banyas, the black banyas, do not.

Banyas with chimneys are known as white banyas, but no one really ever calls them that. They’re just called banyas.

This banya is old enough that it is easy for me to envision the steam room being used by holistic healers, or znakhari (literally “ones who know”), who practice folk medicine with war chests of 77 or 99 different herbs, roots and berries gathered at certain times of day, at certain times of year.

I can picture in this banya young girls gathered, at midnight, to try to divine their futures – the face of the man they will marry, the direction from which he will come. This banya reminds me of scenes of fortune telling, and divination, depicted in War and Peace, by Tolstoy, and Yevgeny Onegin, by Pushkin.

A village banya, at midnight, is the most magical place in all of Russia.

I even can picture this banya as a sort of crucible for the literal birth of families. Women gave birth in banyas for centuries. In fact, historically the banya has served as the locus of all major transitions in human life:

• people were born here

• couples steamed here separately (with friends and relatives) prior to their wedding days, and together the next day, as newlyweds

• the deceased were anointed here prior to burial

I can more easily imagine a banya like this inhabited by the malicious sprite, the bannik, the most powerful of the country’s legion of domestic goblins.

As such, banyas are seen to straddle the natural and unnatural worlds.

This banya makes me recall the best steams I have experienced while traveling throughout Russia. I like to think of meeting its owners somewhere, in a town, and being invited to steam in their banya, this banya, in the country.

Between steams we might walk outside and douse ourselves with water from a basin, or wade into a nearby creek, or river, or lake, to cool. In winter, we might even jump through a hole cut into ice with a handsaw.

A banya like this embodies much of Russia’s ancient bath culture.

This song, White Banya, by Vladimir Vystotsky, uses the banya as a metaphor for Stalinist times.

Venik is a word that doesn’t translate well into English. A venik (VYE-nik) is a broom, or whisk broom. It also is a bundle of leafy twigs.

Veniki, the plural, are the most important accoutrement in a banya. They are the subject of at least a half dozen sayings, such as, “In the banya the venik is everyone’s boss,” and, “In the banya a venik is worth more than money.”

They are used to maneuver the steam, to massage the skin, to treat ailments and to simply infuse the air with aroma. They bestow spirit, or dukh, to the steam.

Bundles of leafy birch twigs are the living symbol of the banya. They are far and away the most popular veniki. But veniki can be made from the twigs of nearly any tree or bush that is supple, as long as it does not have large thorns, or secrete harmful or overly sticky substances.

(watch a version of a decent veniki massage – they vary! – here)

Their leaves momentarily cling to the skin, absorbing sweat and drawing out toxins while, at the same time, imparting essential oils, tannins, and even vitamins C and A.

Their essence makes the skin smooth, elastic. It strengthens hair, and gets rid of dandruff. It eases aches and pains in muscles and joints. It cleanses rashes and abscesses on the skin, and accelerates the healing of cuts and abrasions. It causes bronchi to expand, too, making it easier to breathe.

In the morning bathers might choose a venik from the rowan tree, or stinging nettles, to invigorate the body. In the evening they might choose oak tree, to bring on quiet.

Other times they might choose one of the conifers – softwoods such as fir, pine, spruce, or cedar – for the aroma, and to chase off skin conditions, like acne. They might seek out eucalyptus to treat colds by breathing through the long, wispy leaves, and to accelerate healing of bruises and sprains. They might turn to the sweet-smelling linden tree to get rid of headaches, and to treat skin inflammation.

Sometimes banya connoisseurs will slip fragrant sprigs of currant into a birch or oak venik. They also will add cuttings of bird cherry, a plant whose soft leaves harbor a powerful antiseptic, and smell of freshly-ground almonds.

Veniki are cheap in Russia, about $3 to $4. They are expensive in the States, about $15 to $25. It’s a scandal, really. But if you take care of your veniki, you can use them two, three (or more) times. You also can make your own, like a lot of Russians.

I like to use two veniki, one for each hand. I also like to massage others with veniki more than I like to massage myself. Ideally, the person with whom you steam will massage you, too!

For, as they say, “A banya without a bundle of leafy twigs is like a flower bed without flowers.”

“In the banya there are no generals.”

“In the banya there are no epaulets.”

These proverbs about the Russian steam bath – where, naked, we are without the trappings of our roles in society – hold true for everyone, with one exception: the person who makes the steam. The steam-maker is more equal than others. And that is how it should be, for he or she is responsible for your pleasure.

If a paril’shchik (sometimes called a banshchik) makes great steam, bathers will rearrange their lives to be at a banya when they know that he, or she, will be there.

On Sunday mornings at the Seleznyovsky Baths, in Moscow, the lone exception is the man pictured in the photograph. His name is Grisha, short for Grigory. He makes the steam from 10 o’clock to 12 o’clock. For a decade friends and I went to the baths at precisely those times, precisely for his steam.

We tried dozens of other public bathhouses in the Russian capital. We tried, we think, every single one. Some were nicer, most were less expensive, and all had inferior steam.

So we kept returning to Seleznyovka even though the attendants can be surly, and the owners do not reinvest the profits. We followed the steam.

Grisha is a regular guy, but on Sundays he is transfigured. He is able to strike just the right balance of heat and moisture regardless of the weather, or the number of bathers. It is an ability that lies beyond the realm of science, or habit, an ability that is guided by something arching toward the divine.

“How do I know how much [water] to toss into the stove? I don’t. I do it based on sensations, on feelings, I guess,” he told me once.

The floor-to-ceiling stove at Seleznyovka holds 14 tons of cast iron cylinders – aglow a mercurochrome red – that are heated by gas flame overnight to between 850 and 1,115 degrees Fahrenheit.

I cannot see what is happening inside the stove when Grisha hurls the water, but I know by sound. Water hurled the right way lands with the sound of a wave crashing into a sandy beach. It is not the sound of a wave crashing against rocks. The crash – called a clap, or khlopok – is the sound of the transformation of water into gas, the very creation of steam.

The sound indicates an ideal steam, a light steam.

Sometimes Grisha incorporates tinctures sold at drug stores, infusions of mint or eucalyptus with pure spirit. Other times he uses beer and aromatic oils, such as pine or anise or orange.

Sometimes he steeps herbs – wormwood, mustard, horseradish root, garden lovage – in hot water, making a broth that he hurls into the stove, delivering the scents in infinitesimal droplets.

“With beer, you sense the steam,” Grisha said. “Such a steam embodies a kind of heaviness, as if you’ve wrapped yourself up in something.”

To me the aroma of steam made with beer smells of fresh hops, weightless and crumbly. Some liken the smell to that of bread, baking.

Grisha also uses a hand-turned propeller (they are not customary in banyas) at the ceiling to push out stale air from the steam room, and pull in fresh air. He also uses a wand – a thin aluminum pole about five feet long, with a fabric-covered hoop at one end – that he sprinkles with aromatic oils, then uses to direct steam over the bodies of bathers.

During the hottest steams, the moist steams (which can exceed 240 degrees Fahrenheit at the ceiling), he pulls a black balaclava over his face and pulls on black woolen mittens that reach the elbows. The mask and gloves protect his skin from the hot-hot steam. They also make him look like an executioner.

Grisha’s steam improves my mood, my health, my life. It yields sensations similar to endorphin highs, sensations a female Russian friend calls “wings on my back.” It hastens the physical and emotional recovery from the week that transpired, and revitalizes me for the week to come.

Grisha’s steam changes how I see myself, and the world.

A post on Grisha’s steam, with photos (and sound!), can be found here.

A friend once recounted for me a rafting trip he took one summer, with friends, among the Ural Mountains. One day, after making camp on a riverbank, they built a so-called field banya, or pokhodnaya banya, the most primitive of all banyas.

They gathered dry rocks and arranged them in a thigh-high pile in the style of a bread oven on the riverbank. In the hole they built a fire and stoked it, stoked it, stoked it before waiting for it to burn down to coals. They scooped out the ashes.

Then they erected a squarish tent around, and over, the pile of rocks. They brought in fresh-cut boughs of birch, and pine, and laid them on the ground around the rocks. Then they got naked, and got inside.

Someone began to ladle water over the rocks. The water sizzled. The rocks made popping sounds. The steam wrested from the leaves and needles their essence, swept it up into the moist air. When they became too hot they waded into the river, or unzipped a flap in the roof of the tent.

They did this, heated and cooled, heated and cooled, till each person’s body told him he had had enough.

“You have to understand,” Nikolai told me, “dinosaurs once walked over those rocks. When you pour water on them, it’s…a connection, a conversation with nature. The rocks give you what they hoarded up over the centuries. And what can release that energy, that energy stored up over millions of years? Fire. Heat.”

“When you finish [steaming] you realize, you feel – yes, I’m still a man!”

More Russians have seen the yeti than have steamed in a black banya.

Black banyas are nearly extinct. They just barely exist. They are the truest link to the ancient Slavic steam baths of another millennium.

Black banyas are black because they do not have chimneys. Literally, they are black: the ceiling and interior walls are caked with soot, from smoke.

(see extensive photo gallery – and banya-related music! – at end of post)

These banyas without chimneys resemble dilapidated sheds, or huts. Their walls of logs or clapboard often slant, all but fall into themselves. Their roofs tend to be patched with whatever materials were at hand; sometimes the ceilings are merely sprinkled from above with soil, from which sprout grasses and wildflowers. Their floors of dirt, or rough-hewn planks, are commonly strewn with straw.

At best these banyas are prototypes of a simple peasant cottage with a low door, a small window, and two small rooms–one in which to steam, and another in which to wash.

The black banya is the great granddaddy of the banya.

And the banya is the most Russian thing of all.

As the Russian saying goes, “It’s better to see it once than to hear about it a hundred times.”

“The banya is a negative event, a burden in the convict’s life. The dream of getting clean in the banya is an impossible dream,” writes Varlam Shalamov in his collection of stories, Kolyma Tales.

Shalamov survived for seventeen years in the camps of Kolyma, in the Far East. There, more than three million people died between 1931 and 1953 in more than a hundred camps spread across an area six times the size of France.

It was only one stop in the Soviet Gulag archipelago.

There, as in most prison camps, the banya was a source of dread.

“How can this be?” writes Shalamov. “Is it possible that a human being, no matter what state of deprivation he might be reduced to, will refuse to wash himself in the banya and free himself from the dirt and sweat that cover his body with its festering skin diseases? Can it be that anyone would refuse to feel cleaner, if only for an hour?

“There is a Russian phrase: a person may be referred to as ‘happy as if he just came from the banya.’ Indeed, the phrase accurately reflects the physical bliss experienced by a person who has just washed himself. Can it be that people have so lost their minds that they do not understand, do not want to understand, that life is better without lice than with them?”

Prisoners were given an hour to undress, wash, and dress. All the time they were chilled by drafts from doorways and cracks in walls. A hundred men could be forced into space intended for fifteen. Each person was given one basin of hot water, which he cooled with chunks of ice that stuck to the fingers.

While he washed valuable scraps of clothing – foot rags, spare mittens – were likely to be stolen. Outer garments were collected and steamed separately in an attempt, always unsuccessful, to kill lice. Dirty underwear was collected, and replaced with clean underwear – a seemingly innocuous procedure that, according to Shalamov, generated tremendous anxiety and humiliation.

“I felt a strange and terrible pity at seeing adult men cry over the injustice of receiving worn-out clean underwear in exchange for dirty good underwear. Nothing can take the mind of a human being off the unpleasantnesses that comprise life. Only vaguely do the convicts realize that, after all, this inconvenience will end the next banya day, that their lives are what’s ruined, that there is no reason to worry over some underwear, that they received the old, good underwear by chance. But no, they quarrel and cry….

“The spiritual ups and downs of a convict’s life have shifted to the point where receiving underwear form a small dark window leading into the depths of the banya is an event that transcends the nerves. Having washed themselves, the men gather at the window far in advance of the actual distribution of underwear. Over and over again they discuss in detail the underwear received last time, the underwear received five years ago at Bamlag [another camp system in the Far East]. As soon as the board is raised that closes off the small window from within, they rush to it, jostling each other with their slippery, dirty, and stinking bodies.”

The accompanying sounds, Shalamov writes, could be summed up by the Russian expression: “To shout as if in the banya.”

(Fyodor Dostoevsky, too, writes about prison banyas in the ninth chapter of Notes from the House of the Dead.)

For centuries Russian folklore has spoken of the bathhouse possessing a spirit. More to the point, the bathhouse is possessed by a spirit. For a bathhouse can look empty in Russia, but it never is. It is said to be home to the most powerful of the country’s legion of domestic goblins, the bannik.

The bannik is a disembodied spirit. Sometimes it is said to assume the form of a snake or a black cat, a black dog. Sometimes it is said to appear as a small old man, naked, with a big head, shaggy hair, spindly limbs, and a molting green beard.

Sometimes the bannik is not seen, but heard–in the rustle of leaves from a bundle of birch twigs, or as a voice in the dark, snoring, whistling, laughing, howling.

The spirit is said to be felt, too–in the grope of a paw, the claws only just retracted, or that of a cold, hairy, heavily-knuckled hand down a bare spine.

The bannik (also baennik) is a pagan deity that was demonized after Russia adopted Christianity in the Tenth Century. In some regions it is said to be one of the rebellious angels driven out of heaven by Michael the Archangel. In others it is said to have been born of a fight between God, and the Devil, in a bathhouse.

In most of the tales passed down in the oral tradition of Russian storytelling, however, the disposition of the goblin of the bathhouse is not so absolute. Just as the banya is seen to straddle the natural and unnatural worlds, the loyalties of the bannik, too, are split.

“There are no evil banniks, but there are no kind ones, either,” goes a proverb in the Far North.

There are other reputed haunts of evil forces in Russia–crossroads, thresholds, holes in the ice over a lake, or river. All of these places can “clearly be seen to be liminal areas at which a magical other world begins,” writes William F. Ryan in his breathtaking survey of divination, magic, and witchcraft throughout Russian history.

But none is transcendent like a village banya, at midnight.

“It is unclear: is [the banya] a building or, perhaps, a living thing? Or is it a secret abode, inhabited by creatures who reside in another dimension and only rarely show their faces to people?” writes Neonila A. Krinichna, a folklorist from the Far North.

No one talks of the bannik in big-city bathhouses, the places I usually steam. Its presence is more apt to be associated with bathhouses that accommodate a few, not dozens.

Banyas on wheels. Banyas on pontoon boats.

Really. ))

In my chosen bathhouse in Moscow we would rest between steams, our hair wet, our skin flushed, our backs slumped against benches, our chests rising and falling with a slow, pleasant fatigue from swings in temperature, hot to cold to hot to cold.

We would talk about our jobs, and our loves. We would talk about ourselves, too, when we were able to see ourselves as independent from work, or women.

Sometimes we would talk about what we were feeling, not emotions so much as the physical sensations. Was the steam dry enough, soft enough, light enough? Were our senses aroused more, say, by the aroma of beer with reassuring overtones of mustard, or that of wormwood with slashing accents of peppermint?

Sometimes, when the steam was just right, we would not talk at all. Great steam, like great art, has the power to bring on quiet.

We already would have cooled off – under a shower stream, or in the frigid plunge pool. The phases of hot and cold, the heat of the steam and the cool of the water, are the yin and yang of the Russian banya. One does not happen without the other.

Nobody ever has to remind himself to cool down after steaming. It is innate. The body wants it.

The most important thing in the banya is to listen to the body.

The second most important thing is to do what it says.

Between steams we would drink cool mineral water, too, bottled on the slopes of the Caucasus Mountains. Some of us would drink cool kvas, the dark, foamy, non-alcoholic drink made from fermented rye bread. And some would drink cold beer.

It is something of a taboo to drink cold liquids between steams — let alone alcohol, which banya tradition forbids.

Bathers usually sip warm or hot drinks, such as tea with honey. Hot drinks keep the temperature of the body on a low heat, continue the slow sweat – that is, continue to make us cooler.

Drinking hot tea only seems incongruous, like eating spicy foods in hot climates.

Alcohol, on the other hand, dehydrates the body, makes it more likely we will not hear our body’s signals, let alone do what they tell us.

Still, many in Russia drink alcohol between steams.

The banya is the most Russian thing there is, after all. And nothing can be considered truly Russian if the rules cannot be broken.

They seek out young birch trees in a grove near a lake, or river — trees whose branches are pliant, lush. They cut off segments of about a foot and a half, two feet; they cut the twigs cleanly, never yank or twist them off. Then they place the cuttings in the canvas sack and keep going, until it is filled.

When they get home they let the twigs dry, for hours, in the air. They choose about one to two dozen and lay them on top of each other, pointed in the same direction. They place the thicker twigs in the middle, bounded on both sides by thinner twigs; the natural curve of the twigs must face inward, toward the thicker twigs, which helps strike a balance between stiffness and flexibility.

Then they strip the leaves from the fat ends, forming a handle of about six to eight inches. They bind the fat ends with another twig – or a strip of tree bark, or string, or even wire, whatever is at hand.

The handle is solid, firm. The leafy top is supple: the twigs bend, and the leaves rustle, when swiped through the air.

When they are done binding all the branches they hang the bundles, leafy ends down, from nails or a rope strung below the roof in a shed, or barn. Sometimes they fold the bundles into bales of hay, the aroma of which complements that of the naturally fragrant leaves. (In cities they store the bundles in plastic bags in a refrigerator, or freezer. In winter they store them on a balcony.)

Then they wait till the bundles lay flat in the shape of a fan.

Not everyone waits, though. In June, some bathers carry fresh birch
veniki into the steam room. These bundles are soft, almost velvety. The scent is overpowering, bitter.

But mostly bathers wait – till the leaves of the bundles crinkle, till their green color mellows like paint on a sun-drenched wall.