CiTy wiTH a Coffee SHade

Premier Club Magazine #3 63
premierwellness
И
дух
светлеет
«Как заново родился!». Так скажет
всякий. Когда? Конечно, после бани.
• “I feel like a newly born”, everyone
would say this after having gone to
the sauna or Russian bath.
premier
wellness
62
Well…
Bath!
Традиция истопить баню, водой и паром обновить тело
и успокоить душу уходит вглубь веков. Баня появилась
почти сразу, как только человек научился использовать
огонь и горячие камни для обогрева своего жилища. Наши
предки любили повторять: «Где тепло, там и добро». У источников
тепла грелись и принимали «банные процедуры» племена
ацтеки и майя. Древние инки строили куполообразные
паровые бани из глины и вулканического стекла.
Геродот в своих трудах описывал скифские банные обычаи,
существовавшие в Причерноморье. А летописец Нестор
в «Повести временных лет» (IX в.) рассказывал о том, как на
Руси в бревенчатых строениях обнаженные люди обливались
квасом, били себя вениками и в заключение окатывались
холодной водой.
Традиционная славянская баня – деревянная изба с полатями
и раскаленными камнями, на которые льют воду, чтобы
заклубился пар, – получила широкое распространение в Евро-
The tradition to take a bath, to rejuvenate your body,
soothe the soul and calm the spirits goes back to the ancient, pre-
Christian times. As soon as people learned how to warm up their
dwellings with fire and warm stones, they immediately invented
a bath. Our ancestors used to say: “If it is warm, then it is kind”. The
sources of heat were used by the Aztec and Maya tribes for warming
up and bathing. The ancient Inca built cupola-shaped steam
baths out of clay and volcanic glass.
Herodotus in his works described Scythian bathing traditions
of the Black Sea area. Annalist Nestor in his “Tales of Bygone Years
(The Russian Primary Chronicle is a history of Kievan Rus’, 9 century)
wrote that in the ancient Russia naked people in wooden buildings
would throw kvas (rye-bread beverage) and cold water on themselves,
beating themselves and each other with switches of green birch twigs.
Cold water would be used again at the end of the bathing procedure.
The traditional Slavic bath-house is a wooden izba (log hut)
with wooden planking (used for lying) and burning hot stones to
pour water on them for steam-making has become wide-spread in
Western Europe. There such a steaming bath was called a Finnish
sauna, while in Eastern Europe its names were parnaya (steaming
bath), laznya, lazenka, and, most frequently, a Russian bath. The
main differences between the Western and Eastern bathing procedures
lie in the type of walls, whether
they are made of logs or smoothly
squared, the degree of heat, the way
of heating and level of humidity.
There are still heated debates going
on whether dry heat is better
than the steam, whether it is
good to use a switch of green
birch twigs, and if it is, what
is the best type of it.
In the old Roman and
Byzantine times Europe got
acquainted with Eastern
bathing techniques. Alexander
the Great, one of the
most successful military
62
Winter ‘08-09