There’s no staff at Sompasauna, so if you think the place is messy, you’ll have to clean it yourself.
WORLD’S MOST PUBLIC SAUNA THE 20-MINUTE walk from the Kalasatama metro station to its southern-most tip feels like you’re on the set of a Mad Max movie. It’s basically a wastelandcum-massive construction site, with huge piles of gravel and the odd graffiti-covered cement slab. But make this trek off the beaten path and you’ll be rewarded with an entirely different kind of beating – with a birch whisk at the guerilla-style Sompasauna. The tiny, self-service Sompasauna is two shack saunas on the banks of the Gulf of Finland just next to one of the city’s most up-and-coming neighbourhoods, Kalasatama. The smaller sauna fits three to four people and is heated up to a scorching 140 degrees Celsius (284 degrees Fahrenheit). The main sauna is cooler and more social, with room for 16 to 20 people. The story behind Sompasauna is almost as quaint as the saunas themselves. In 2011, a group of friends found an old abandoned wood-burning sauna stove in a forest in 38 BLUE WINGS SUMMER 2017
northern Helsinki. So they did what any self-respecting Finn would do and built a sauna around it. After hearing about the new sauna from some friends, Saara Louhensalo was one of its very first visitors. Today she’s one of Sompasauna’s unofficial hosts. With no permission to build or occupy the site, the city tore the sauna down three years in a row. Every time a dedicated group of volunteers rebuilt. After three years they registered as an association and made a deal to rent the spot from the city. According to Louhensalo, Sompasauna is an experiment in “radical openness.” It’s open every day around the clock, it’s completely free, and there’s no gender separation. And there’s also no staff, which means the saunas have to be heated by visitors. If you’ve never heated a sauna yourself, fear not, there’s a guidebook to walk you through it. One of the handiest instructions is: “If you need help, it’s best to ask a Finn.” And finding one isn’t usually too hard. Sompa-