Note 03 · Etiquette
The bench: what is actually rude in a shared pirtis
A pirtis with four people in it runs on rules that nobody in the room could write down. Most of them come from the fact that one person's good steam is another person's ceiling, and the ceiling is where the trouble starts.
- Written at the pirtis
- 11 May 2025
- Typed up
- 2 July 2025
- Reading
- 6 minutes
- Where
- Ignalina, Utena County
One person runs the steam
Whoever heated the stove runs it, and everybody else asks. That is not a hierarchy, it is plumbing: the person who has been in and out for three hours knows how much water the stones have already taken, whether the hatch is open, and how long the room needs between throws. A guest reaching past somebody for the ladle is the one thing I will actually say something about, and I say it lightly the first time, because they are almost always just being enthusiastic.
Asking is easy and it keeps the evening pleasant. Say you would like it hotter and it will be hotter, usually inside two minutes. Say nothing, endure it and leave early, and everybody else concludes you did not enjoy yourself. In a room holding people of different tolerances, the one who wants the least heat sets the pace, not out of kindness but because that is the person who will leave first, and an evening where people leave in sequence is not the same evening at all.
From the card by the stove
- The person who heated the stove handles the water
- Ask for more steam; nobody minds being asked
- The least heat-tolerant person sets the pace
- Sit on the lower bench before you move up
Where you sit, and when you leave
The difference between the top bench and the one below it is fifteen degrees, sometimes more, and a newcomer who sits at the top because there is space will be out of the room in four minutes and will not come back in. I put people on the lower bench for the first round without making a performance of it. Feet go up on the bench rather than down on the floor, because the cold air sits below the knees and nobody with warm shoulders and cold feet has ever relaxed.
Leaving in the middle of a round is normal and needs no announcement. The door stays shut for a moment after somebody has gone out, which sounds obvious and is forgotten by everyone at least once a winter. Ten seconds of open door in February costs a quarter of an hour of heating: the steam falls out of the room like water out of a tipped bucket, and whoever is still on the top bench feels it arrive around their ankles.
Talking, and the long silence in the middle
The first round is when people talk, usually about the drive out, the state of the ice, somebody's roof. By the second round the conversation thins out on its own, and this is the part newcomers find difficult: twenty minutes in a hot dark room with four people saying nothing at all. Nobody is being cold to you. The room is simply not a place where anything has to be held up, and that silence is what most of us came for in the first place.
Two subjects are worth leaving outside, in my experience. Anything that would make somebody defend a position turns the bench into a table, and anybody's health is nobody's business in a room where everyone is sitting in a towel. Beyond those, what is said in the steam has a way of staying there, which is not a rule anyone announces and is probably why people say things on a bench that they would never say across a kitchen.
Bringing somebody new
A first-timer needs two things explained and nothing more: that they may leave the room whenever they want, and that the evening is long. Everything else, the vanta and the lake and the third round, will happen or it will not. Pushing somebody into cold water because it is traditional is how people end up never coming back. I tell them the steam is not a competition, and then I try to behave as though I believe it, which is the harder half.
The practical part is short. Water stands on the porch and they should drink it; a warm shower before the first round makes the heat easier to settle into; anybody who feels dizzy sits down where they are and then goes out, in that order, because standing up quickly in a hot room is how a person ends up on the floor. If somebody has been drinking, they stay on the step outside and we talk to them through the open door.