Wild Ice & SaunaYear round
Smoke Sauna Evening
A sauna with no chimney
A smoke sauna has no chimney. The fire burns for five or six hours inside the room itself, heating a large mass of stones, and the smoke leaves through a hatch and through the walls. Then the fire is let out, the room is aired and wiped down, and only then does anyone go in.
What is left is a heat unlike any other sauna: lower in temperature, far softer, and holding a smell of birch smoke that comes out of the blackened timber for as long as the building stands.
It is the oldest form of the thing and very nearly died out. That it survived at all is down to a few families who kept building them, and the ones you sit in now are mostly recent buildings made the old way rather than antiques.