Let's Talk about Bathhouses!

The bathhouse. The communal and sometime solitary building where humans got clean, or purified themselves spiritually, and maintained social connections. Saunas, banyas, sweathouses, sentōs, hammams, thermae. Whatever they were called, they became an integral part of the tradition of cleansing. They were how ancient people held court with one another. They were centers of everyday society. They were places of religion. They were centers of hygiene. So, grab a towel, perhaps a venik if you have one. Douse some hot stones in water, throw some logs in the furnace, and let the steam take you on a journey. 

Water tanks, Sweat-huts, and Staying Warm in Winter.

Bathhouses are ancient creations. One of the first “bathhouses” was less a house, and instead a public water tank. It was discovered in the Indus Valley, and was known as the “Great Bath of Mohenjo-Daro”, built around 2500 BC. This enormous water tank was built into the ground, surrounded by stone. The stones were laid ultra-tight, and the walls plastered with water-resistant tar. The Bath was filled through well water, but rainwater may have helped with this. This bath was designed for ritual bathing. 

Sweatlodges and steamhuts were some of the first bathhouse structures. Not water though. Steam. These were found throughout the ancient world. The Native Americans and First Nations of Canada had their forms of medicinal huts. Participants would sit naked in the hut, while a “decoction of the beaten roots of the wild parsnip” would be poured over hot rocks. (1) The door would be sealed shut, and the person inside would profusely sweat as a way to spiritually cleanse themselves. This can be seen in Mesoamerican cultures as well with the temazcal. These were often permanent, domed structures of masonry, tied to Mesoamerican cosmology. But the steam in both the temazcal and the northern sweat huts wasn't merely hygienic. Elsewhere, steam was something you passed through on the way to the sacred — a step in the circuit. Here, the steam was the sacred. No circuit. The sweating was the act.

Bitter winters and lonely days are kept at bay with the banyas and saunas of Northern and Eastern Europe. Northern European saunas are dry, and hot, roughly 175-195 degrees Fahrenheit. Russian banyas run slightly colder, 158 degrees Fahrenheit, but much more humid, 40-70%. Banyas are loud, boisterous. Friendships are emboldened as the veniks, birch leaves and branches, are smacked across the body. The Northern European saunas are more reserved. Quieter. The sound of the vihta, much gentler than their eastern cousins.

Bathing Communally. 

For full scale, communal enclosed bathhouses, we look first to the Greeks, who began the tradition, then the Romans, who made them monumental, then to the Arabs, who shifted the spirit entirely. Greek balaneia were modest. They were usually attached to gymnasiums. They had hip-baths, and attendants pouring water over the bather (see History of Showers…and Bathtubs). Simple. 

Now the Romans. Let's take you through a thermae. You strip down in the apodyterium, the changing room, and hand your clothes to an attendant. Then you're anointed with oil, head to toe; don't miss a spot. Out to the palaestra, the open courtyard, to work up a sweat — wrestling, weights, a ball game. 

When you're slick and dripping, the cleansing begins, but not with soap. The Romans barely had any. An attendant scrapes you down with a strigil, a curved metal blade that pulls the oil, sweat, and grime off your skin in long strokes. 

Then you climb the heat. First the tepidarium, the warm room — the social heart of the place, where neighbors talk politics and business, the wealthy and the not-so beside one another, all of it warmed from below by the hypocaust: a furnace driving hot air through a forest of little pillars beneath the floor, the heat rising up through tile and stone. 

Then the caldarium, the hot room, thick with steam, a scalding pool waiting. And finally the frigidarium — the cold plunge, the bracing shock that ends it. The same hot-then-cold rhythm of the banya, a world away. And loud. Always loud. Seneca lived above a bathhouse and hated it — the grunts of the men heaving weights, the slap of the masseur's hand "varying in sound according as the hand is laid on flat or hollow," the splash of the show-off who cannonballs into the pool. (2)

When Rome fell in the West, the bath did not die. It moved east. Through the Byzantine world and into the Islamic Golden Age, the Romans' blueprint was inherited and remade into the hammam. The bones are the same — the graded rooms, the hypocaust beneath the floor — but the spirit shifts. In Islam, ritual washing precedes prayer, so the hammam was never only hygiene; it was purification of body and soul at once, often built beside the mosque. You enter through the cool room to undress and ease in, pass into the warm room to open the skin, and arrive in the hot room, domed and steaming, its centerpiece a heated marble slab where you're scrubbed, exfoliated, and kneaded. Like the thermae before it, the hammam was a great social leveler — a public space where people of different classes, and different faiths, met on common ground. Steam, stone, and water, handed down across a thousand years and three civilizations.

Far Eastern Steam

Sentōs of Japan follow a similar concurrent path. Steam was seen as a spiritual cleansing agent in Shinto and Buddhist tradition. Large bathhouses were built under the watchful eye of monks, and steam baths were offered to the populace as charity. The first commercial sentōs appear in 1591 in Tokyo. By the 18th century, these sentōs were everywhere. Home bathing was restricted due to fire risks because of the dense wooden architecture associated with Japanese cities. 

There was a major difference between Arabic and Roman bathhouses and Japanese sentōs. In hammams and thermae, you got clean in the bathhouse. In sentōs, you cleaned and washed yourself before the soaking. In a separate room from the warm water pool, you would sit on a low stool, scrub and rinse. The tub is the destination, not part of a circuit.

Conclusion

Since its inception, the bathhouse, the steamhouse and the sauna have been cultural institutions. They were not only a place to get clean, but they were designed for piety, for communing with each other. 

The steam united us all.

1.(Mooney, James (1891). "The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees". Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology)

2. Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 56, trans. Richard M. Gummere (Loeb Classical Library, 1917–25). Public domain; via Wikisource.