ODESSA – Bring a sheet and get on board!
This is how I experienced saunas Anna Lebedeva advises guests in a public sauna in the port city of Odessa.
Lebedeva goes to a public sauna every week and knows the rules.
Also the fact that nowadays women and men take saunas together. That’s why you’re not naked, but the saunas keep your underwear on.
The situation is exceptional anyway. The million-strong city of Odessa is in many places without electricity and water, but the sauna, or locally Banja or banka, is also warming today.
We enter the hot and humid steam room. A beanie is necessary: it protects the head from the heat.
Ukrainians have had to live Putin’s subject to a major attack for almost a year.
War news has become routine: where the airstrikes hit, how the troops have advanced, what the president is doing Volodymyr Zelenskyi tells about the war situation in his video message.
It is less often told about what war does to a person. What war does to bodies and minds.
A less inventive but very Finnish idea is to try to find out the physical effects of the war by taking a sauna with the Ukrainians. The sauna is a place where things quickly become profound.
On the upper decks of the sauna in Odessa, the weakness of the idea is revealed. Having a conversation in a sauna is not very easy. All the oxygen goes into enduring the humid heat.
It soon becomes clear that a new unwritten rule has formed in the public sauna during the war. According to Anna Lebedeva, in the past, a lot of politics was discussed in public saunas, but not anymore.
Now there is a break from the surrounding reality.
– In the sauna, you don’t talk the same way anymore, you don’t judge, Lebedeva says after the sauna session, when I ask about it.
Anna Lebedeva clearly has no problems taking strangers close to her.
The first lap is over. In the washroom, Lebedeva orders the Finnish guest to lie down on the washing machine.
The washcloth flaps on the thigh and then on the neck. He literally soaped the Finn he met from head to toe.
In Ukraine, it is still common for friends to wash each other’s backs.
In the middle of the washroom there is also a professional cleaner’s table, next to which a man dressed in shorts lathers saunas. He also offers cupping under everyone’s eyes.
When it comes to washing, Lebedeva has a strict order.
After washing the whole body, it’s time to exfoliate. Lebedeva has mixed cinnamon with isocrystalline salt. It is rubbed all over the skin. Salt exfoliates, cinnamon brings a good smell.
We have just met Lebedeva, who is giving us a sauna. I don’t want to ask too intrusive questions about how war feels in the body.
During the ice break, he starts talking about it himself. He says that the weight has clearly increased. When you’re anxious, sugar tastes good.
He tells about a familiar teenager who was in Mariupol at the beginning of the war and escaped the Russian bombings in the basement.
The boy managed to escape in the end, but the coldness of the basement stayed with him, says Lebedeva. According to him, the boy still wore a top coat even in the summer heat.
The doctors at the nearby maternity clinic in Odessa also say the same thing. War really shows up in women’s bodies in a harsh way.
Leading Obstetrician Irina Holovatyuk says that many menses have been disturbed or stopped. Some have lost weight. Some have hair loss or skin symptoms.
In the maternity hospital, it has also been noticed that pregnancies have lengthened. Babies are born more and more often after a clearly calculated time. The director of the hospital says that many mothers are afraid to give birth.
Russia has attacked maternity hospitals several times.
Fear is a physical experience, but so is relief, says a Ukrainian acquaintance who fled the war to Odessa Julia a couple of days later with coffee.
Julia said that she had called her neighbor in her liberated home village, which had been occupied by the Russians for months. The neighbor told Julia that the village smells different now that the Russians left.
The neighbor thinks the air smelled different during the occupiers.
Anna Lebedeva has also noticed a change in the way people are with each other outside the sauna. He uses the same analogy as the Finnish president Sauli Niinistö when talking about Putin.
The war took off the masks. According to Lebedeva, the masks also fell from the faces of the Ukrainians.
Lebedeva says she feels that she sees people somehow more clearly. People haven’t changed, but the basic character traits have come out more clearly than before.
He uses another metaphor. He says that the beginning of the war was like the eruption of a volcano. The shock erupted in people in different ways.
Some of his acquaintances shut down and retreated to their own family.
– That is their full right.
But many did the opposite and started helping others wherever possible. The crisis brought people closer together, which does not always mean harmony.
Lebedeva lives in Odessa in a residential area, some distance from her favorite sauna. Her husband and grown sons are at home. So far, they have not been called to the front.
Lebedeva tells the neighbor that her husband recently got nervous. The reason: the neighbors had tried to give money for the benefit of using the Lebedeva family’s generator during power outages.
The offer of money was insulting because of course they give power because they can.
– Even though I don’t want war, I like how people now help each other.
It is in the sauna turn of the next session. Anna Lebedeva fills the wash basin with crushed ice and takes the soaked veals with her.
– Lie down there, comes the order by the boards.
Vihtomining is not splashing with anger, but the loosening of the winds right next to the skin. The hot air stream bites softly.
Finally, crushed ice is applied to the burning skin.
In the middle of a rainy session, the electricity goes out in the steam room. No one reacts to pitch black in any way. Just as few reactions are caused by the mobile phone app that pops up, which tells you that the air alert has started.
It takes a few minutes before the lights come back on. Maybe thanks to the aggregates.
Ukrainians’ calm attitude towards air raids and blackouts has been explained not only by habit but also by the country’s difficult history. I have had to adapt to many horrors.
Lebedeva talks about her grandmother and the time when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.
Grandmother served in the Red Army as a relay soldier. He visited his grandson’s school to present his World War II medals. Then the Soviet Union fell and the family received a message from Germany. The German state wanted to pay compensation to those in prison camps.
It turned out that the grandmother had been a prisoner of Nazi Germany between 1942 and 1945. He never spoke about it, not even after the family found out about it after Germany contacted them.
– Only then did I realize how grandmother had avoided men after that. But I don’t know what happened in the camp, says Lebedeva.
During the Soviet era, it was better to keep silent about being a prisoner of the enemy, because it was easy to end up in a prison camp in one’s own country for “betraying the fatherland”.
According to Lebedeva, this is the big difference between the previous war and this war. Now Ukraine is a country without authoritarian rule.
Traumas occur, but we should not keep silent about them, as in the Soviet era. Everyone gets to tell their own version of the war.
Still, even in this war there are stories that the whole world wants to see and the side of the war that we want to keep quiet about.
Lebedeva says somewhat surprisingly that it is better not to talk about everything directly yet. According to him, it is correct that the Ukrainians have not been told the exact number of soldiers who died in the battles.
Lebedeva believes that the knowledge of the number of dead would, above all, erode the will of civilians to fight.
– People would start screaming if they knew what the price of all this is.
Electricity is returned to the washroom, and the mood is suddenly reprimanding. After the rainy session, we have left loose leaves on the rafters, something other saunas notice.
It was difficult to clean all the leaves in the dark, but the explanation seems pointless. Although the time is exceptional, the sauna has sauna rules.
In the dressing room, pulling jeans over damp skin is as awkward as ever. The photographer did not bring a change of underwear to replace the ones that got wet in the sauna.
Anna Lebedeva notices this. He pulls his own trouser waist down and slaps his exposed butt. He’s also a commando.
– Solidarnost! he exclaims to the cameraman. Solidarity.
You can discuss the topic until Sunday 18.12. until 11 p.m.
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