It's as close to lunacy as I ever hope to get -- and it's exhilarating.
The sauna, the well, the snow are part of an excursion to a banya in Sergiev Posad, the premier town of the Golden Ring and the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church.
I could have stayed in Moscow and returned to the Sandunoff Bath-House, located in a fraying but elegant 18th-century building with marble and ebony interiors, and painted ceilings. The Sandunoff is an all-service spa with steam rooms, cold baths, massages, manicures, pedicures, Russian cuisine, vodka, and beer. One afternoon in the steam room there, with intermittent cold baths and a massage, turned my hardened travel muscles to mush.
But my city banya only lasted a few hours. I have been promised a daylong encounter, an uber-banya of sorts. So I have journeyed with my niece and her friends to Sergiev Posad, an hour north of Moscow, where Svetlana and Yuri Kurilkin open their home on weekends for small groups to enjoy what they call a ''Russian experience."
The custom of going to a banya can be traced to medieval times. Most Russian villages had communal bathhouses where men and women would steam themselves, beat each other with branches, and roll in the snow to cleanse the body as well as the soul, and to drive out illness. Every banya also had its own mischievous resident spirit called a bannick (after Bannick, the Slavic god of bathing), often described as an old man with hairy paws and long nails. Late in the day an offering of twigs, soap, and lye was left for the bannick, who liked to bathe alone or, it was said, with the devil.
