Being Hit with Branches and Eating Crayfish at Russian Banyas Is a Blast

If Russia wants to maintain its tough guy image overseas, their old-school saunas do all the PR for them. The banya, described by various Russians I know as a "first doctor" and a "second mother", is a place where you can sit in a very very hot room, a very very cold pool, get whacked with twigs, wear a silly hat and drink exquisitely freezing vodka with your friends over lunch. Banya No.1 in Old Street is, somewhat bizarrely, the only Russian banya in the whole of London. Let me tell you right now, I'm sick of going to the pub to hang out with my friends—we need more of these things. You can even book a private booth in the restaurant so you can sit and eat your post-steam lunch naked. This is living, people.

The whole point of the banya is to boost your circulation, and everything is focused on nourishment and

cleansing

. After taking off my oppressive outdoors clothes and climbing into my (very optional) swimming costume, I was presented with a hat made from sheep wool to stop my head getting too hot while I lay on a bedsheet in the wood-panelled sauna. When you can't take anymore, you are walked into the dining room where a pot of traditional herbal tea and Ukranian buckwheat honey awaits. "The

tea

helps you to keep sweating," a member of staff tells me. "And the honey is cleansing, too. The most important thing is to keep your body temperature high." The tea is a savoury mix of thyme and peppermint, plus dried linden flowers to boost digestion. "I am going to give you a scrub. For you, I think honey and salt," says German, the sweet, inscrutable, muscular Latvian spa therapist while I'm draining my cup. How come honey and salt? "Is for bad skin," he says flatly. Huh. Thanks, man. Sulking like a 15-year-old who's been told they're not allowed to go to Reading Festival, I'm led by German into the wet hammam. There's no way to phrase this without sounding like a pervert, but German has the kind of hands too big to do up the fiddly clasp of a necklace. His scrubbing technique is magnificent. The combination of the heat, the scrub and the humidity make your skin feel turbo-charged, like you're being lit from inside. A much better acne cure than Clearasil and self-loathing. Yet more tea follows, as a prelude to the

venik

"massage". Along with Gennadiy, also an impressively proportioned chap, they get me to lie down in the sauna on top of eucalyptus leaves and gently whip me with massive bunches of acorn branches, which increases the circulation in your skin and also, magically, makes the sauna seem even hotter. Whipping is followed by having buckets of cold water chucked over me, while German yells "SURPRISE!" and then total immersion in a pool chilled to eight degrees. Someone is screaming and I realise it's me.

Shivering and pink as borscht, German wraps me in a damp sheet. "Vodka, yes?" He pours an enormous glass of Russian Standard chilled to minus 50 degrees. It's so cold he has to wrap a thick towel around the bottle before pouring. Do I drink the whole thing in one? "Yes, hup hup hup!" I'm told the vodka is purely for "antiseptic purposes", to get rid of any germs picked up in the sauna and

not

to get drunk, but the quadruple measure has me on my pathetic English knees. The lunch, though, gets me off them and I stop acting like a little baby for long enough to replace the fluids I sweated out with silky cured herring, raw onion, cold sprats and mealy black bread. The herring is forked up with the onion, and the sprats are accompanied by buttery boiled new potatoes, sliced in half and served warm. The banya increases your appetite and makes you feel like you've been chopping wood instead of sitting down. I almost fall head first into my herring.

Then comes an enormous plate of British crayfish, as perfectly red and shiny as

The Little Mermaid

's Sebastian. To eat them, you crack open the tail and pull out the white flesh, careful not to spill the coral orange

pearls of roe

inside, then break through the tough little claws and suck out the meat. As I inhale, I swear I can taste the sea.

The other main pull of Banya No.1—as if you needed further convincing after the acorn branch slapping—is one of the only places over here that makes homemade

kvass

. The bitter drinks are made from fizzy,

fermented

rye bread and raisins or beetroot and sauerkraut juice. Tolstoy wrote about their cholera-repelling properties and, yeah, they do taste pretty medicinal and like they may have a profound effect on my insides later. Chatting to a woman from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, I ask if Russia has an unfairly bad reputation in the West. "Yes, I think people don't understand here," she says. "Maybe my heart is still in Russia." What about Putin's anti-gay laws? Does it make sense that people think they're barbaric? "The old generation is very influential on the young in Russia. People in Russia do not like gays or lesbians because society has become more religious in recent years. I hope this will change, but do not think it will happen quickly." Hmm.

The banya is a magnet for Russian émigrés in Britain. This is where homesick oligarchs, Russian footballers and dancers come to act tough in the sauna, and shoot the breeze with their friends over food. Civil rights and venture capitalism and history don't come into it. Everyone is equal when they're naked, three shots of vodka down and spilling crayfish roe all over their hands.