Note 05 · An evening
Three rounds, and the long half hour between them
An ordinary evening here is three rounds and takes about four hours from the first match, of which perhaps forty minutes is spent in the steam. The rest is the half hour in between, which took me a long time to stop resenting.
- Written at the pirtis
- 14 June 2026
- Typed up
- 23 August 2026
- Reading
- 6 minutes
- Where
- Ignalina, Utena County
The first round is for the room, not for you
The first round is short, dry and slightly disappointing, and it is meant to be. Ten minutes on the lower bench with two small throws, mostly to find out where the room is: how fast the heat comes back after the door, whether the corner above the window is still cold, whether the stones give the sharp, immediate steam that means they are properly through. Wet hair and wet towels brought in at this stage hold the whole evening back by a quarter of an hour.
People who arrive determined to get the most out of an evening tend to treat the first round as a test and go straight to the top bench. They spend the second round recovering on the porch and the third asleep in a chair by the door. Going in warm rather than cold helps more than anything: a hot shower beforehand, skin dried properly, and an unhurried ten minutes sitting low down make the round that actually matters a great deal easier.
The second round, and the vanta
The second round is the one people remember. The room is at its steadiest, the stones answer a ladle at once, and enough heat is stored in the logs that the door has stopped mattering so much. This is where the vanta comes out, soaked ten minutes in warm water, worked first in the air above the bench to bring the hot layer down and then over the back and legs in long sweeping strokes rather than blows. Hitting hard is a beginner's habit, and the leaves do not survive it.
Doing it for somebody else is a different job and a better one. The person on the bench lies flat, face down, arms at their sides; the one standing works from the feet upward, keeps the leaves moving and stops every half minute to press the warm bundle flat against the lower back. Twelve minutes is plenty. A good vantojimas leaves the whole room smelling of a clearing in June, and it is nearly impossible to do for yourself with any rhythm.
Cooling: the porch, the lake, the half hour
Cooling is not an interruption of the evening, it is half of the evening. In summer that means the lake, in winter the hole or a bucket, and in the weeks either side of the ice it means standing on the porch in the dark until the steam has stopped lifting off the shoulders. The half hour between rounds goes on sitting on the step under a towel, drinking water, saying very little, and waiting until going back in feels appealing rather than dutiful.
Water is the one thing I am firm about with guests. A jug and a cup live on the porch table and everybody drinks between rounds. Nothing that happens in a pirtis is improved by alcohol, which, along with the ladder, the ice and the dark, is why it stays outside the gate until the evening is over. A thermos of tea in February is worth more than it sounds, mostly because it gives people a reason to sit outside for the full half hour.
From the card by the stove
- Half an hour between rounds, sitting down, out of the heat
- Water on the porch table; everybody drinks between rounds
- Go back in when it appeals, not when the clock says so
- Nothing here is improved by alcohol
Knowing when the evening is over
Three rounds is the shape. Four happens in the middle of winter when nobody wants to drive home yet, and five has never once turned out to be a good idea. The signal is easy to state and easy to ignore: when the first two minutes of a round feel like something to get through rather than something to enjoy, the evening is finished, and sitting on anyway to keep somebody company is how a good night quietly becomes a flat one.
Closing up takes twenty minutes and belongs to the rhythm as much as the steam does. The last of the soaking water goes over the stones, the benches are rinsed and left to dry with the hatch open, the buckets go upside down, and the door stays ajar until the room is only warm. Then I write the evening on a card by the door: date, outside temperature, hours of heating, wood burned, who was there, what I would do differently. Those cards are what this site is made of.