How a cedar sauna differs from a bathhouse
There are not as many differences as one might think. Russian bathhouses and Finnish saunas were traditionally used for recreation and replaced bathrooms in places where it was impossible to install them. In tsarist Russia and later, public baths were much less luxurious than Sandunov's, but they allowed the inhabitants to keep themselves relatively clean. And in Finland, until the 1940s, many children were born in the sauna - it was often the most hygienic place on the grounds and allowed to carry out the "shameful" procedure away from the eyes of men, as was then thought necessary. Nowadays, cedar saunas and baths may consist of only two rooms: a locker room and the steam room itself - but there must be a separate room for washing, if not a different room, at least a shower nearby. The main thing in the bath and the sauna is the process of heating, which is achieved in a slightly different way. In the Finnish sauna, though, the temperature is high (about 80 degrees,...