In the late 1970s, I spent a year studying German at the University of Umeå in the north of Sweden. Many of the students came from neighbouring Finland. We soon discovered that our student home had a sauna in the basement. After a tough day at the university it was a relief to spend an hour in the sauna. The only problem was to keep the beer cold…

Sauna baths can be found all over the world today but most people associate the sauna with Finland. Nowhere else in the world can you find as many saunas as in Finland. Some sources claim that there are two million saunas in the country – not bad for a nation with a population of just 5.3 million people.

Finland is a country which has an incredible amount of lakes and most Finns like to build their sauna next to a lake.

A sauna is basically a small wooden hut with a stove which is used to heat the room where there are benches for the bathers to sit. From time to time water is splashed onto the hot stones on top of the stove to create a steamy environment. The temperature in the sauna sometimes reaches as much as 60-100°C.

In Finland, bathers use freshly collected leafy silver birch twigs to beat their bodies gently as this apparently improves the cleansing process.

Some bathers enjoy a swim in the nearby lake after a session in the sauna. This is something people I do even in the winter when the lakes are covered by ice. The bathers simply make an opening in the ice to allow them a quick plunge into the freezing-cold water.

The habit of enjoying sauna baths has spread to many parts of the world. Strangely enough, one of the world’s major manufacturers of home sauna baths is located in this writer’s home town of Halmstad, Sweden. Called Tylöbastu, this Swedish company has a record of continuous expansion to new markets evidencing the worldwide interest in this way of cleaning your body.

A friend of mine has built his own portable sauna which he can easily bring along whenever he is travelling in Sweden.

You cannot be shy if you want to visit a sauna as men, women and children generally bath at the same time. I recall a visit to a hotel in Swedish Lapland. After a long day of siding in the mountains we all looked forward to a hot sauna bath. There were two doors clearly marked MEN and WOMEN but they both led to the same sauna. You can of course use a towel to cover your body but that is normally not the case.

In 1949, Finland released a set of four semi-postal stamps in aid of the Red Cross. The 5 + 2 mk value shows a young woman preparing the birch twigs. The 9 + 3 mk denomination illustrates the interior of the sauna. In the upper right comer we see a bather using the twigs.

Finland Red Cross semi-postals from 1949

A typical Finnish sauna is depicted on the 15 + 5 mk stamp. Finally on the 30 + 10 mk top value we see a couple of bathers running to the lake for a refreshing swim.

This has always been one of my favourite Finnish stamp sets as it tells so much about Finnish culture.

On May 6, 2009, the Finnish postal service apparently felt the need to depict the traditional sauna in a more modem fashion. Using photographs from a variety of sources, Paivi Vainionpää has designed a most interesting set which was released as a five-stamp self-adhesive booklet. He has included the birch twigs and a pile of fresh towels, a couple of scenes from a sauna, a sauna located next to a lake and a close-up of a bunch of twigs.

2009 self-adhesive booklet

The stamps are issued as first-class stamps and a complete booklet sells for four euros (5 x 0.80 euro). It is hard to know how to handle this kind of booklet stamps in mint condition. I guess collectors will have to display the stamps as a complete booklet. In used condition the stamps can of course be treated as normal stamps.

There is a time span of 60 years between these two issues. Which issue do you like best?