192° and rising
visiting an uncelebrated russian banya in brighton beach, brooklyn
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It’s 192 degrees and rising.
A stone oven consumes the entire back wall of a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot hotbox where I’ve voluntarily come to vaporize my body, alone. If not for the giant “1980” painted across its façade, I’d believe it had been carved from an immovable, ancient Brooklyn boulder, not unlike the entrance to Petra. The oven’s heavy metal door is the size of a pizza box, set into a multilayered cake of roughly laid masonry. Behind it burns what might be the hottest fire in New York. It smells like a one-to-one cocktail of airborne sweat and dried eucalyptus branches, veniks, currently being used to rather violently exfoliate the back of a pruney, prone, beached-whale of a man. Steam fills the room, my muscles loosen, endorphins release, and blood flows like the express train. Bodily, it feels euphoric, and yet I still have my antenna up. The mood in the room isn't exactly tense, but there's a solemnity blanketing the space. Men face each other, expressionless, sitting on three tiers of wooden benches; the honey-colored slat walls sweat just as much as we do. This is the Russian Baths of Brooklyn, N.Y.
It’s my first time here, but not my first time saunaing. I came to this place at the suggestion of a history-buff bartender friend, hoping to reclaim a feeling I’ve been missing, of being somewhere that asks nothing of you except to be present. My introduction to sauna was about as welcoming as a new ritual can be. I’d spent a summer writing at an artist residency in Joutsa, Finland, a small municipality about four hours north of Helsinki. Surrounded by birch forest and lakes without names, my fellow residents and I creatively communed in a big yellow house at the end of a quiet road. Life was slow, in the best way. In the basement was a sauna that opened directly to a green sylvan field, where a small firepit seemed to eternally burn. A miniature wooden figure sat on a shelf in our sauna, labeled The Saunatonttu or “sauna elf.” In Finnish folklore, the Saunatonttu protects the sauna, bringing good luck to those who need it. The whole scene felt wonderfully wholesome, worlds away from the churn of city life outside my Crown Heights window back home.
But here I am now, back in Brooklyn. When I arrive at the Russian Baths of Brooklyn, N.Y., I’m given no instructions from the front desk, no welcome tour, just flat slippers and a locker key, hardly a roadmap. Luckily I find my way to the sauna and take a seat among a dozen surly, nearly hairless, middle-aged Russian men who move through this space like it's an extension of their living rooms. Some sport towels, others let it all hang out. I'm currently one of the toweled, though I still feel exposed. Between us hangs a stormcloud of differences: age, language, culture, comfort, but the most immediate one I notice is perhaps also the most superficial, plastered plainly on my face. In a room full of bare chins, I'm already convinced I'm doing something wrong. My beard feels less like a style choice and more like a breach of etiquette; I've broken an ancient dress code.
A memory stirs from the graveyard of my AP Euro textbook: Russia’s fraught relationship with beards. This bald-faced look wasn’t merely a trend but a mandate codified by Peter the Great, the Beard Tax. It is one of many changes implemented by Peter the Great to force Russia into a more modern age as it fell behind Western Europe. It was recorded that once you’d paid your fee, the tsardom issued a bronze “beard token” as proof you’d shaved your fair share. Rationally, I know that nobody in this room has thought twice about my beard save for myself, but melting in the heat of the sauna, beard intact, I can’t help but feel conspicuous, as if at any moment the men around me will reach into their towels, produce their bronze coins, and firmly ask, “Where’s yours?”
Readjusting to New York was hard after my nymphic stint in Scandinavia. I was yearning for space, for nature, and for that present feeling that travel grows within us. It became a priority for me to seek out the feeling in my own backyard, and I found it in Brighton Beach. I’d visit on the coldest days, if only to drag myself further out of my element. The boardwalk, which on a summer day was sardined with beachgoers, was instead claimed by heavy coats shuffling past the frozen sand, sipping ice-cold vodka from paper cups for warmth. You had to surrender your ego and embrace the art of pointing at a menu to order. You had to commit to your curiosity and accept your awkwardness. It felt like travel practice, the way it demanded that kind of participation. Luckily for me, it was all just a forty-five-minute subway ride away. When I heard there was a sauna spot here in Brighton, I couldn’t help but chase the same peaceful escape from city noise I’d come to crave under the midnight sun in Joutsa.
Not surprisingly, our Beard Tax friend Peter the Great had strong opinions on sauna culture as well. Allegedly, when asked about the lack of funding for medics in the military, he answered, “The banya alone is enough,” referencing its healing powers. But the reputation of the banya to outsiders long predates Peter. In the twelfth century, the Apostle Andrew traveled north into the lands of the Slavs and recorded one of the earliest descriptions of the Russian banya, something far less serene than the Finnish version I’d come to know:
“I saw the land of the Slavs, and while I was among them, I noticed their wooden bathhouses. They warm them to extreme heat, then undress, and after anointing themselves with tallow, they take young reeds and lash their bodies. They actually lash themselves so violently that they barely escape alive. Then they drench themselves with cold water, and thus are revived. They think nothing of doing this every day, and actually inflict such voluntary torture on themselves. They make of the act not a mere washing but a veritable torment.”
Not exactly the bucolic dreamland I had experienced in Finland. Russian folklore, as it turns out, also has its own version of the Saunatonttu, though this one is far less friendly. Instead of Finland’s protective sauna elf, the banya is said to be watched over by the Bannik, a hairy-pawed, ill-tempered spirit who lives behind the stove and punishes those who disrespect the ritual. Descriptions vary, but he’s often imagined as a small, naked old man covered in stray leaves from retired veniks. Leaving my Crown Heights apartment and silently riding the subway to the Russian Baths of Brooklyn, N.Y. feels, in some small way, like my version of Apostle Andrew’s journey to twelfth-century Russia. Now, sitting here in a towel with my brunette beard, I feel like the odd man out, and that the Bannik is lurking, waiting to catch me in a nonritualistic act. He feeds on my imposter syndrome, do I really belong here? Is this a space I should occupy?
Before I can act on that doubt, someone stirs, drawing the room’s attention. One gentleman, grizzled and naked, sits closer to the oven than the rest of us. Beside him rests a ladle carved from a single piece of wood and a sauna bucket made of vertical slats bound by metal rings; no nails, which would loosen as the wood expands and contracts in the blistering steam. His bony hand rests on the pail with ownership. Maybe it’s the mind-scrambling heat, but I can’t help thinking I’m sitting in the room with the Bannik himself.
He surveys the men around him, taking his time, zeroing in on each bead of sweat dripping off our faces. After silently judging our character, he makes his move. He stands and shuffles toward the fire-breathing oven, tools in hand. At his eye level hangs a large warning sign, or at least part of one. Half melted, it reads: CAUTION, VERY HOT DOOR. DO NOT TOUCH OR OPEN OVEN DOOR. DO NOT POUR WATER INTO THE OVEN. The sign’s misshapenness suggests an even graver warning:don’t get too close, or this could happen to you. Despite all this, the Bannik flips the latch open with the ladle without hesitation, opening what feels like a portal to hell. Heat spills out, unleashed and unchecked. He feeds soup servings of water to the thirsty beast, fogging the room with a fiery vapor that crawls deep into my lungs.
He checks the temperature of the room once more, not by glancing at the red digits of the analog thermometer above the door, but by drinking in our faces. I make sure not to show emotion as the heat climbs. 195…196…197… Don’t be the first one to leave, I think. You can’t be the only one without a beard token and be the first one to bail under the heat of the lamplight. 198…199…the nails holding my solid molecules together feel like they are loosening. I begin to sublimate, the way dry ice doesn’t melt but instead evaporates into silky, weightless curtains. After five long minutes, a slight nod confirms I’ve passed, as for the first time in my sauna experience, I see the thermometer tick up to 210 degrees.
I emerge from the sauna, reborn, and spot a row of cooling stations just to the left of the entrance. These are makeshift stalls with no showerheads, no hot-and-cold gauges, just a jerry-rigged exposed pipe jutting out from a removed drop-ceiling panel, a fraying rope dangling from it. Instinctually, I pull it, and a violent rush of the coldest water I’ve ever felt crashes down over my head, source unknown. It shocks my system so severely that I let out involuntary burps. Dazed, I shuffle over to a cluster of monobloc plastic chairs facing a small mounted TV playing a hockey game. Alone for a moment, I feel like I've been wrung out and left to dry, less of a person, more of a loosely arranged collection of body parts. At the table beside me, a group of the men sip beers. Clocking my state, one of them hands me a bottle. I nod my thanks and drink, he's been where I am before.
This isn’t the tender Finnish sauna I came looking for. It’s a different kind of hospitality. There’s no performative catering, no need to wrap guests in comfort. At first glance, the whole routine might seem like a test rooted in masculine posturing; an all-male room challenging the newcomer to endure the veritable torment Apostle Andrew described. But somewhere between 197 and 210 degrees, through the sound of eucalyptus branches cutting through the air, you get lost. The outside world becomes genuinely unreachable and curiosity alone is enough to earn you a seat on the bench, where the message is plain: this is how we do things, you’re welcome to join, beard or not, so long as you’re willing to accept that. That’s what I had been missing. I didn't need to travel halfway around the world to find the feeling I ached for. I learned that the banya is enough.
