What does a saunottaja do?
The saunottaja profession was still very much alive in the early twentieth century, when saunas were mainly village and neighbourhood saunas. Saunottajas were bath attendants, washers, whisk practitioners, cuppers, ritualists, healers, herbal medicine practitioners and tietäjä (traditional folk sages): those whose work took place in the sauna.
The occupational health and wellbeing of saunottajas was discussed in the columns of newspapers, and saunottajas did not serve only in their own sauna. There were also travelling saunottajas: masseurs, cuppers and tietäjä who were invited to villages. The village sauna was heated, and everyone who needed treatments or ceremonies could come to their services.
The spread of the electric stove brought saunas into homes, but at the same time sauna culture changed drastically. With this change the saunottajas disappeared too. With them, a large part of the healing and ritual side of the sauna was forgotten: whisking treatments, cupping, and the sauna traditions of the yearly cycle and the stages of life.
Now, after almost a hundred years of oblivion, a need to remember has awakened.
Finns sauna a lot, but what is done in the sauna today is only a narrow slice of what the intangible cultural heritage of the sauna offers and means. The work of the saunottaja is neither time travel nor nostalgia for the past. It is the cherishing of age-old principles of health and wellbeing in a way that lives in the present day.
With the gifts of nature, incantations and treatments, the saunottaja serves both the löyly (sauna steam) and those being bathed.
The saunottaja heats the sauna, prepares the sauna supplies, carries out sauna treatments and sauna ceremonies of the stages of life and the yearly cycle. They wash, clean, teach and guide. The saunottaja is a servant of the löyly and the sauna, offering multisensory, healing and restorative cultural experiences in the present day. The work draws deeply from the roots of Baltic Finnic tradition and the nature of the North.
