Question by charles g: What are the main differences between a “black” Banya (Russian bath house) and a “white” banya?
And which is used more often… I’d like to hear from someone who has first hand knowledge of bath houses or saunas please. But others are welcome to respond.
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Answer by Nikolay
Black Banya was in use 100 and more years ago.
The furnace of black bath has no chimney so smoke came out thru special windows and the door.
People in the villages hasn’t money enough to bay bricks so they made hoses with chimney but baths without.
Even now you can find out houses in the Russian rural areas with Small windows situated in upper Corner of the housetop. Now that windows just atavism but ages ago it was used for excurrenting smoke
Also visit this page(sorry only google translate (((
http://translate.google.ru/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=ru&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mokshenbanya.ru%2Fblack_banya.html
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ChrisP says
The difference is simple: The black banya has an open stove, and the white banya has an enclosed stove with a flue that exhausts to the outside of the banya.
The black banya is a heat storage type of bath like the Finnish smoke sauna or the Korean charcoal sauna. Inside of the bath is the stove with its mass of rock. The stove has no chimney, but vents to the inside of the sauna chamber. When the fire is burning, a hole in the roof is opened to allow the smoke to escape. This fire is fed until there is enough heat stored in the stones to maintain the sauna temperature.
Before the sauna can be used for bathing, the fire must be extinguished, the coals removed, and all of the surfaces of the inside of the banya need to be cleaned of the ash in the room. The smoke door in the roof is closed, and then the bathers enter. The first bathers have the hottest experience. As time progresses, the banya gets cooler, as no more heat is being applied. However, with a large enough stove, the banya could keep its heat for days.
A white banya is the urban banya. The stove is fully enclosed. It can be heated with electricity, gas, or wood. If it is fuel-fired the rocks are isolated from the smoke from the fire. These gasses are vented outside of the banya via a chimney. Since heat can be applied continuously, a white banya can be occupied 24 hours per day. It is also much easier to install a white banya in an urban setting, as it is cleaner, and there is no danger of carbon monoxide poisoning of its neighbors.
However, one advantage that the black banya has is that smoke and soot are natural disinfectants, so the inside of a black banya gets a complete disinfection every time it is used. A white banya has to be disinfected using other means. The Koreans have made some studies of their charcoal saunas and found that they convey additional benefits than saunas with "modern" stoves.
I don't know of any commercial black banyas or smoke saunas in the USA, but King Sauna has Korean-style wood-heated charcoal saunas in their three US locations (NYC, Dallas & Chicago).