The Rebel Badge Club’s February challenge badge was fairytale-themed and one of the clauses was to go skinny dipping, in brackets, legally. That clause caught my eye. I’ve spent enough time in Icelandic showers and German saunas that I can probably do that. But where? Go down to the sea on my own after dark? In a February ruled by storms and flooding? That seemed like a bad idea for so many reasons. Then I realised that in two weeks and a day I’d be going to Helsinki, home of the sauna, and if I couldn’t find somewhere to swim naked in Helsinki, something had gone wrong with the world.
Finland’s oldest pool is the Yrjönkatu swimming hall. It was notorious for having banned swimwear from the day of its inception in 1928 until 2001 when it became optional. It was closed for major renovations in 2023… but it would be reopening in four days’ time, just a week and a half before I arrived, with its previous swimwear-optional policy intact. It felt like a sign. This pool has been waiting for me. And just to hammer the point home, it was a six minute walk (seven if you include slipping over on the ice on the way) from my hotel. Can’t say no to that, can I?
Because of this optional nudity, Yrjönkatu operates strictly separate men’s and women’s days. Women get more days – four instead of three – but the hours are more restricted. On men’s days, it opens at either 6.30 or 7am but on women’s days, it doesn’t open until 12 on Monday and 11am on Sunday. That’s for the first floor, where you’ll find the pool, the lockers, the showers and the medium and hot saunas. For an extra charge, the second floor is open every afternoon except Monday, plus an hour each first thing Sunday morning. The second floor gives you a private rest cabin/changing cubicle, your own balcony table where you can order food and drinks and a few more saunas.
Finding the building is easy enough but the door is not the big one just inside the gate with the opening hours on it. No, the door is the one at the far end of the courtyard with “iso-allas” (“big pool” in Finnish) and “simbassäng” (swimming pool” in Swedish, I assume) over the door. Inside, you pay a pleasant person in an old-fashioned wooden booth and are given a key on an elastic band. You can either leave your footwear in the lockers here (you set your own four-digit code to lock it) or put them underneath and then you go through into the pool area.
Your key has a number on it, so find your locker. Unless you’ve paid extra for the cabins or the second floor there’s no privacy here and the Finns seem spectacularly unbothered. There’s not really even any privacy in the lockers, which are mesh-fronted. And before you go in either the pool or the sauna, you’re required to shower with no swimsuit. Save yourself the hassle of changing twice and just go down to the showers at the far end in your towel. You’ll need it – the locker area is for dressing, not drying, and you should dry off in the shower area.
So I’ve already shown my flesh prison to anyone who was near my locker or in the shower. Why not just go and earn the clause for the February badge? Not that I’m looking, but I absolutely am and the website looks pretty correct when it says that it’s a roughly 50/50 split between swimwear and not. I figure a lap of the 25m pool is plenty and I can put my swimming costume on after that.
Actually, it doesn’t feel entirely unnatural or uncomfortable. It’s not my preferred way to swim in public but as a novelty, it’s something I can do. So I ended up, over the course of my two hours (which, again, no one is monitoring, or not on a reasonably quiet Sunday lunchtime), I swam 40 lengths. Ten at a time with a sauna trip in between each set.
Having never been here, it’s hard to tell what happened during three years of major renovations. A lot of stuff behind the scenes, probably. No one scrubbed the pool’s grout in that time, I’ll tell you that. The blue marble-esque columns and arches look much the same as they do in any “before” pictures I’ve found. But I think the showers and saunas are new. They’re entirely too clean and white and sleek to be merely renovated, and the wood in the sauna is pristine, like wood that hasn’t been heated and soaked over and over again for even two weeks yet. On the left as you come from the pool is the medium sauna; at the other end is the hot one. And as per any single-sex sauna in the shower area, they’re swimwear-free, unless you have a licence badge. So it’s easier not to wrestle in and out of swimwear four times in two hours.
This is how the Finns truly sauna. Not in rustic wooden beachside sheds but in public saunas either at the local pool, in their apartment buildings or home or even at the workplace. These saunas here are electric. Upstairs there was a wood-powered one but just two weeks into Yrjönkatu’s new life, it was already out of order.
At Löyly, the big public (tourist) sauna, you’re given a “sauna cover”, a cloth to sit on in the sauna for hygiene and heat protection. As far as I can tell, they’re not mandatory at public pools but it’s nonetheless the done thing to sit on a towel and almost everyone does. And I had one – a miniature microfibre travel towel specifically for sauna, rather than either soaking my only proper towel or requiring me to travel with two proper towels, which is quite the thing in this age of greedy airlines restricting your baggage on the flimsiest of excuses.
So I went in, found myself a spot, laid out my cover and sat down. Finnish saunas tend to be a bit dark. Tiled walls, wooden seating three tiers high, a single light underneath the seating, and a stove roughly shoulder-height on me. Naked women of various shapes and ages sitting mostly on the upper levels. Nothing will dispel the myth of the Nordic goddess quicker than a public sauna. Finnish women just are not tall willowy icy blondes. Oh, some of them are pretty perfect but the majority are ordinary women, just with less of the natural shame about their bodies than most inhabitants of this island over here have.
I tried to observe how real Finns sauna. What is the ritual, the etiquette? Naked and with a sauna cover, got that. But that seems to about it. They like splashing water on the stove to send up a cloud of steam, only it’s not really steam because the stove is electric. But the temperature does tangibly increase. I’ve seen some people who carefully pour on four or six ladles of water, sure to cover the entire surface. I’ve seen some who throw the water from more of a distance than it’s really efficient to throw. There are no pointed felt hats or bunches of whipping birch or swirling towels in Aufguss ritual. There’s just people sitting in a hot room for a while.
I tried the contrast therapy thing by having a cold shower afterwards but the showers barely turn down to lukewarm and the pool is actually colder. The medium sauna felt a bit unsatisfying, even for someone who until recently has declared that she can’t really stand the heat of saunas. I found myself seeking out and then returning to the hot sauna. I found myself staring at the löyly-master, the person sitting closest to the water bucket, wishing they’d throw some on. I can’t ask – I don’t have the Finnish for that and I don’t know what the ritual is when you’re not the bucket person. Or even when you are. Some people asked the sauna in general before skyrocketing the temperature. Some just went ahead and did it. I only did it if I found myself alone.
So ten lengths, sauna, shower, repeat. Four sets and it was time to go. That means drying off before you go anywhere, getting dressed next to your locker on the poolside and hoping you remember both the number of and the code to the locker where you left your boots. Then you hand your key back say kiitos (thank you) and head out into the snow and ice, where all that sauna heat will leach out of you in two minutes flat…
I Am A Polar Bear 