We asked a finish colleague about smoke sauna (you heat with wood and a part of the smoke is lead inside), about details and reason.
Answer: We don't need a reason for sauna.
Answer: We don't need a reason for sauna.
Most Finns are accustomed to going to sauna weekly. It’s such an ingrained part of our live that don’t really think about it.
We’ve got 5 million people and 2,5 million saunas.
Sauna is free from distractions like electronics, it’s free of associations relating to productivity and work, so it becomes a meditation of sorts, but we usually don’t try to make it so.
Sauna is sauna. Sauna’s purpose is sauna. The benefit of sauna is sauna.
As for the reason, the design is just really old. It's how you heat a sauna when you don't have a chimney. As a side effect, the long heating, the large thermal mass, and supposedly the soot that collects on the walls combine to produce a reputedly smoother experience with the heat seeming to be more even than in a more modern sauna.
To be clear: The smoke comes inside only when you heat the sauna and goes out trough small opening in the wall. You bath after the fire is out, not when the sauna is full of smoke.
What is left is the smell of smoke in the walls.
A smoke sauna is just an inferior version of the modern Finnish sauna. It's a bit of a hassle to prepare and I personally dislike the "smoke effect".
So called "aitokiuas" type stoves replicates the gentle heat feeling that comes from heat storing smoke sauna without the smoke. They can be electric or wood stoves.
This is an interesting sentence construct that can be interpreted in two completely different ways!