The origins of the sauna go back to prehistorical sweating huts; their role as a place of hygiene for rural households emerged in the early modern period. The sauna was identified as a nationally Finnish tradition by Carl Axel Gottlund, who came to notice and appreciate it during his ethnographic field trips in the 1810s; this nationalization was consolidated by mentions in the Kalevala and Alexis Kivi’s novel Seven brothers (1870); typically, these were middle-class, urban cultural producers from an originally Swedish-speaking background, celebrating a social institution which for them was at the same time deeply exotic and symbolically national.

The critic and philologist August Ahlqvist, known for his severe criticism of the ribald nature of Kivi’s book, advanced a theory in the 1870s deriving the sauna from Byzantine bathhouse prototypes which had spread north by way of Russia. This was in line with contemporary German-language interest in steam baths: German and Austrian medical and ethnographic reports on the phenomenon covered Russia and Finland as an undifferentiated cultural zone. A counter-voice was raised, however, by Maximilian Buch, a Baltic German and medical graduate from Dorpat/Tartu, who had settled in Helsinki as a military physician in 1880 and who, as an expert on skin diseases, ran a health spa in Lappeenranta from 1885 until 1890. Buch, who also wrote on ethnography and Estonian-Finnish mythology, published an article “Über den Ursprung des russisch-finnischen Dampfbades” in 1889, in which, against Ahlqvist and current German-language scholarship, he vindicated the nationally Finnish authenticity of the sauna. In the same year, Akseli Gallen-Kallela depicted it as a domestic feature of Finnish life. By then the word “sauna” had already become a Finnish loanword in many European languages, marking the status of the institution as an icon of Finnish culture.