by Alexia Brue
Christopher might point to some circular cuttings in the earth and say, 'What do you think caused these cuttings?' Loud silence. 'Was it a spaceship?' he'd ridicule. 'Perhaps, but probably not.' Long pause as everyone examined their shoelaces. 'Well, of course it was a door! Those are the grooves caused by the door opening and closing.' Of course! He floated in a transmillennia bubble. 'Look at me,' he'd exclaimed. 'Archaeologists can walk through walls.' And as he'd walk from room to room, where once there were walls, I wondered which period, antiquity or the modern day, was more alive in his mind. Who was more real, Herodes Atticus, the man reputed to have built the Isthmian bath, or the twelve of us standing in front of him on this sweltering May day?
Christopher took us on a dizzying tour of what would have been the tepidarium (warm room), caldarium (hot room), frigidarium (cold plunge pools), and the underground alcove where the hidden slaves fed the furnaces. I took notes in my small orange notebook, citing the irregularities in where the drain channels connected, the mystery surrounding the destruction of the bath. Fire? Earthquake? Christian destruction? We simply don't know. Dr Christopher addressed all the questions raised by physical remains of the bath.
So relentless was his attention to evidence, evidence, evidence, that when he asked, 'Does anyone know what this room would have been used for?' I answered: 'The frigidarium?
'Why?' he asked.
'I don't know, it just has that. . . vibe.' Garrett suppressed a laugh, and Christopher curled his lip. I knew it was a word he'd hate.
'Lucky guess. You're right, because this was a ring-style bath, where the bather would progress in a circle from warm to hot to cold. From the placement of this room, we can deduce its purpose.'
'What did the Romans do inside the bath?' I asked Dr Christopher, hoping he might detail Roman habits and lifestyle and not just their brilliant engineering.
Dr Christopher informed us that they had found strigils inside the bath. Strigiling, in addition to sweating, was the main caldarium activity. The strigil was an odd device used for cleaning the body that the Romans copied from the Greeks. A strigil, usually wrought in iron so it wouldn't bend, looked like a cross between a sugar spoon and a meat hook. After working up a healthy glow, the bather would rub a sand-and-olive-oil mixture onto his body. Rubbing this gritty substance on the body exfoliated all the dirt and dead skin, then the bather would start scraping the sand mixture off his body using the strigil. The sand and olive oil scooped up by the strigil was then flicked onto the walls, where it was believed to add a curative effect to the surroundings. Even though modern medicine might tell us otherwise, I would have preferred ancient levels of sanitation to the present-day bathrooms of the Rooms Marinos.
We walked through the banquet room, covered by a protective tarp weighted down with pebbles, and stepped over the fifteen-inch remains of a wall into room one. The archaeologists have assigned numbers to each room. 'Everything must have a name,' Dr Christopher would repeat six times daily. If you had no idea what an object was used for, it might become 'piece five found in basket four of trench two.' Rather than make any assumptions about what a ceramic shard or a room was used for, everything was classified according to location. Archaeology is an art that doesn't allow for editorializing.
Room one, Dr Christopher explained, was probably the apodyterium.Athletes and Poseidon's pilgrims — Isthmia's main customers would pass into this room after paying the balneatorzt the door, who, if he was a nice guy, would bid them the customary bene laves (bathe well!). In the apodyterium, a large rectangular room with benches and overhead cubicles, street tunics or competition garb (unlike Greek athletes, Roman athletes did not compete in the nude) were replaced with lighter cotton bathing tunics and wooden sandals to protect feet from the hot marble floors. Bathers would deposit their valuables, street sandals, and sesterces in the cubicles. Rich customers could afford to leave slaves to watch their belongings, but most people had to take their chances, and theft was common.
This Isthmian bath was surprisingly grand and ornate considering its backwater location. Yes, it lacked the epic proportions of the Roman imperial thermae (the Baths of Caracalla in Rome were a thirty-acre palatial waterworld!), but Isthmia wasn't Rome after all, it was an Olympic outpost used every two years as well as a destination for Poseidon-worshiping pilgrims. Like the three other Olympic sites - Olympus, Delphi, and Nemea - Isthmia had to have a large bath complex for athletes, spectators, and pilgrims alike. But where the Isthmian baths surpassed the other Olympic baths, and raised so many questions among archaeologists, was in its enormous banquet hall with a magnificently wrought monochromic mosaic, the largest and most accomplished in the eastern Mediterranean.
Tomorrow we would be indulged in our only 'digging' responsibility. We would shovel away the pebbles, remove the protective tarp, and water down the mosaic to reveal the enormous rectangular nautical tableaux. Depicted in tiny black-and-white squares were a small army of Nereids riding Tritons. In the center, Eros drove a dolphin while other dolphins playfully leapt about with eels, lobsters, squid, and octopi. The subject matter was standard stuff for a bath situated next to a Temple of Poseidon, yet the execution and scale were quite sophisticated. More romantic theories suggest that after Herodes Atticus' younger lover drowned, Atticus was looking for an appropriate tribute.
Isthmia's gargantuan banquet hall also pointed toward the future role of baths in the eastern Mediterranean according to ancient bathing scholars (a surprising hotbed of study) like Fikret Yegiil, dubbed Mr Roman Bath. The Roman thermae evolved differently in different regions of the empire. In the East, the thermae was slowly transformed into the more introverted hamam, an inward-looking building suited to a modest religion. The central room of early Islamic baths, aka hamams, was a large banquet hall used for socializing or cultural activities. Here in Isthmia's luxurious banquet hall, with its decorative mosaic and massive statues — a room obviously designed for social instead of athletic interaction - we see the first hint of a changing bath architecture, a small nod to future hamams.
Studying the Isthmian dig's field notebooks was fascinating intellectually, and for a day or so I even fantasized about enrolling in archaeology graduate school. But the study of baths wasn't as interesting as the practice. As John, the only hothead among the Baptist students, said after Dr Christopher waxed for forty minutes on exactly what the Temple of Poseidon would have looked like 1,800 years ago: 'Well, it's not here now. Let's go eat.' I was starting to relate to that sentiment; there was only so much time I could give to suspending my disbelief about walls, arches, and domes that no longer existed.
I realized that my trip had reversed the flow of history — from Istanbul to the Roman world. I was time-traveling back through the empires: Istanbul to Constantinople to Byzantium; then, sidestepping down the Dardanelles, I'd encountered the destruction of the pagan world, the riches of the Roman-occupied Peloponnese, and the innovations of the Greeks. I had arrived two thousand years too late. The Roman bathing scene was in ruins, and the Turkish scene wasn't far behind.
It was time to leap ahead to the contemporary havens of public baths, where spa culture was still communal: to Russia, to Finland, to Japan. And why not? I no longer had a job, and Charles promised to come and visit. Yet again I extended my return, enjoying the continued liberation from the trivial worries of home - Did I lock the door? Is it garbage night? All of life's business was in able hands with Charles. Bills would get paid; the apartment wouldn't burn down. I was free to explore my fascination with public baths, the physical spaces, the swirl of activity around them, the secret parts of people that emerged when inside. This was no longer just 'taking the measurements,' as Marina and I had done in Istanbul. This had turned into, well, the search for the perfect bath.
russia:
vodka, sex, and banyas
A banya without steam is like cabbage soup with no grease floating on top.
— Old Russian proverb
Perhaps the march of time would be
less marked in Russia. The Russians are certainly proud of their Russianness, and perhaps this nationalistic pride translated into holding on to village traditions like the banya. I had always heard that there were four prerequisites to being Russian: weekly visits to the banya, drinking either too much vodka or none at all, easy access to cheap caviar, and the right to enjoy your suffering. Russians suffer with style. In America, suffering veers toward self-pity; the Russians, however, manage to imbue suffering with nobility.
My great-grandfather Isidore Sirota was born in Belarus, often referred to as 'White Russia,' before immigrating to New York City at sixteen years old. Izzie was not the vodka-drinking, caviar-eating, long-suffering variety of Russian. He did, however, carry with him, from old country to new, a lifelong appreciation of the shvitz, the Yiddish word for a banya. The banya, which translates as 'bathhouse,' transcends its literal definition and its humble architecture — a dark-wooded hut containing a furnace of hot rocks. Moreover, it inspires a distinct way of life with its own menu, accoutrements, appointed hour, ceremony, and ritual.
I lived with a Soviet TV journalist turned fiction writer turned tour guide named Irina. No patronymic, just Irina. According to Irina, journalists shed their fathers' names in classless togetherness. Irina was a miniaturized aging Bond girl of the Ursula Andress school, a petite blond with wide-set small brown eyes and cheeks that resembled split-open peaches. Twenty-five years ago she must have been a knockout, and there was still an unmistakable feistiness in her eyes and the way she sashayed around in her high-heeled black boots.
Irina had perfected the art of spin. When I stepped into her tiny fifth-floor walk-up apartment, hyperventilating and disoriented, she greeted me with a Cheshire cat smile and the loud impersonal boom of a tour guide: 'Welcome to your beautiful home.' Of course, I couldn't help but smile back, grateful to see my first friendly Russian face and to have a place at last to put down my suitcase. I ignored the moldy beer factory smell and quickly slipped off my shoes, as the guidebooks instruct. But the guidebooks also say your host will offer you slippers, and Irina didn't. I was stumped.
She toured me through the apartment, smiling like a delirious Vanna White: 'This is the kitchen, where I will serve you a delicious breakfast every morning. Now come, I will show you to your beautiful room.' I followed her down the short, narrow corridor with peeling rose-patterned wallpaper. 'And this is your wonderful room. Now I leave you to put away your things.' I looked around my beautiful, wonderful room, with an old, fusty leather sofa you might find in a 1890s train station, dusty bookcases, and a bed designed to produce instant insomnia. I flicked on the switch to the crooked chandelier. Only one bulb illuminated. Thank God for white nights. I looked at the solid oak writing desk. Home office. Sweet. Then I looked at the bed more closely: a one-inch-thick foam futon on top of a blue plastic frame. I sat down and the frame teetered and almost buckled under my weight.
How did I end up in this person's home? I wondered to myself. It was disorienting for me to be here, but I imagined how scary it must be for Irina to open her home to random foreigners. It's not as if the host organization that brokers these home stays does any sort of background check on those of us drifting through Russia.
Irina bounced in and wanted to give a tutorial on locking the front door and using the bathroom. If there was ever a time to be happy I was doing research on public baths, it was when I saw Irina's bathtub: small and stained reddish brown by the rusty water. I knew my search for the perfect bath was not going to end in Irina's apartment. At first I took the water stains as a good sign, a sure sign that there was indeed water, but when I saw the rate at which water trickled out of the faucet, I realized it was a miracle that this tub had water stains at all.
My banya research must start straight away. The next morning, I showed Irina my list of St Petersburg banyas that I had heard or read about (a dozen or so of the fifty-eight listed banyas in St Petersburg): Kruglye, Banya #50, Banya # 5 1 , Banya #24, Banya #45, Nevskie, Yamskiye. During Soviet times, all banyas were state owned and operated and were identified by numbers instead of jazzy names like the Comrade's Hot Rocks. Indeed, under the Soviets the banyas proliferated in much the same way the Roman thermae had two thousand years before. Down at the Politburo, the Soviet leaders joked, just as the Romans had, that the decline and fall of the Soviet empire was directly related to the explosion of banyas and the ensuing debauchery and heat-induced laziness.
The reason behind the 'banya for the masses' plan was quite simple: Going to the banya was a classless weekly pleasure enjoyed by all Russians. Building palatial sweat lodges with tiled pools for comrades to sweat together helped perpetuate the myth of the Utopian Soviet state. Not to mention that the banyas were an ideal environment to purge oneself of the toxins that sadly became a fact of life under communism.
Irina scanned my list, smiling, looking nostalgic, and nodding her head.
'So many banya memories. I haven't been in years.'
'Where should I go, Irina?'
'You really want to go? These places not Western. Nobody speak English.'
'Well, maybe I'll pick up some Russian.'
Irina cocked one eyebrow at me. Over breakfast that morning, she had labored to teach me some simple Russian phrases and was less than dazzled by my linguistic abilities. I had studied Romance languages in school — French and Italian - but the unlikely bunching of consonants in Russian was unutterable for me.
'Go to Tchaykovsky,' she said with characteristic certainty. 'Walk down Nevsky Prospekt to the Fontanka River. You'll see two bronze horsemen, there should be four, but two are getting fixed. There take a right and walk for a long time, past Anna Akhmatova's house, past Peter's Palace in the park, then you'll see it on your right. Wait, first I call and make sure it's not free day.'
'Free day? Free day sounds good.'
'No, not good. Not pretty. Each banya once a week have free day for poor people. Not nice time to go.'
She called the banya, and it was a regular fee-paying day.
'Watch your dress.'
'What?'
'I have my dress once stolen at Tchaykovsky banya. Oh, it was a terrible picture. There is me, after banya, naked and looking like a duck, and the banya lady she steals my new flower cotton dress. Oh yes, a very terrible picture. I walked home naked in my coat.'
I hit the Nevsky Prospekt with a backpack full of banya essentials: little plastic bottles filled with soap, shampoo, and conditioner, and my faithful green rubber flip-flops. They had trudged through nearly fifty hamam visits in Turkey, and now they were about to be exposed to serious banya heat.
I walked up the east bank of the Fontanka River, a seven-kilometer river that draws an arc around the heart of St Petersburg and comprises the popular tourist stomping ground known as 'within the Fontanka.' The Fontanka is a wider, more magisterial tributary than the shaded, ambling, canal-like Moyka, where Tolstoy had his home. I reached the point where the Fontanka flows into the Neva, the huge river that hems the city to the south. In the winter, Russian parents still dunk their newborn children through holes in the icy Neva in an ancient rite, a pagan peasant baptism reputed to improve the child's heartiness if it doesn't kill him first. Just before the vortex of the Fontanka and the Neva, on the western bank, I saw the gardens of Peter the Great's humble brick-and-stucco Summer Palace, his first imperial dwelling just an unpretentious cut above the wood cabin he lived in previously. It would take only four years for him to bury his peasant values and build himself the Versailles-inspired Peterhof at enormous expense.
With no time to dawdle at cultural relics, I promptly took a right on Tchaykovsky Street and right there, just as Irina promised, was a sign advertising Banya #17. Despite the end of communism, the banyas still lack more individual names, though people refer to them by their location. But I was learning that this is a common Russian phenomenon. Russians don't devote thought to coming up with clever names for commercial establishments. Instead of christening one's private busi
ness with a catchy, memorable name that might lead to an identifiable client base, Russians settle for names like obuf or producti, meaning, respectively, 'shoes' or 'products.'
No bustle or vestige of human life animated Tchaykovsky Street, and I feared that the banya inside would be as abandoned as many of the hamams I visited. Once off the city's main boulevards, St Petersburg felt empty and desolate, like people inhabiting the set of a movie that finished filming long ago. I walked into an enormous darkened lobby with what has to be the world's largest coat check. Rows and rows of naked hangers wound back into emptiness. But there was no attendant and there were no coats. Directly in front of me, an old woman sat scrunched up on a stool behind a plate-glass window. She was the only life form in the lobby. I couldn't read the Russian sign, so I just walked up to her and whispered, 'Banya?' in a way that sounded unintentionally conspiratorial.
'Da, banya.' She nodded while staring down at the pages of a thick paperback. I expected her to name a hugely inflated price. Most Russian institutions, like the Kirov Ballet and the Hermitage Museum, have a separate set of prices for Westerners, and it's often ten times the Russian price. But at the Tchaykovsky banya, the price was 3 rubles (roughly 10 cents) for everyone.
After collecting the tiny fee, she waved me upstairs, as if our transaction were an ordinary occurrence. I expected her to recognize how far off the beaten path I'd traveled or at least to act mystified, as the hamam ladies had, when I turned up day after day. But the Russians are as introverted as the Turks are extroverted.
I wandered upward in this cavernous building, like the colossal public schools built in the 1950s and later demolished because they were lined with asbestos. Signs in Cyrillic bounced me from room to room until I saw two women in their mid-twenties with flushed faces and damp hair. 'Banya?' I asked.