A bannik is the spirit of the Russian bathhouse. He lived behind the stone stove or under the bench, and his one job was to see that everyone kept the rules of the bath. The rules were short. Do not bathe alone, and do not take the last round of steam. Ask permission before you go in. Leave water and soap behind for him, and say so out loud.
The bathhouse itself, the banya, was a low hut of stacked logs with one room, a flat roof and a pile of heated stones in the corner. It had no chimney. The smoke left through the door or a small window and blackened the walls, so these bathhouses were known as “black”. The building stood away from the house, often at the edge of the yard.
What Is a Bannik, the Bathhouse Spirit?
The bannik lived in a building that people treated as risky ground, and the church agreed. The oldest account of the Russian bath comes from an early Russian chronicle. In it the apostle Andrew travels north, reaches the place where the city of Novgorod stands today, and watches the locals steam themselves.
“I saw wooden bathhouses,” he says, “and they heat them fiercely, and they undress and are naked, and douse themselves with tanner’s kvass, and take up young switches and beat themselves.” Kvass is a sour fermented liquid, and tanners used it on hides. The bathers beat themselves “so hard that they barely crawl out, half alive”, then pour cold water over themselves and revive. Andrew sums it up in one line: tormented by nobody, they torment themselves, and they call it washing, not torture.
The same chronicle uses a bathhouse as a death trap. Princess Olga of Kiev invites the envoys of a neighbouring tribe to wash before they meet her. She has the bathhouse heated, locks them in and sets it on fire from the door.
People placed the bathhouse outside the Christian world. However close it stood to the house, they said it lay seven versts away, about seven and a half kilometres, and for that reason you did not pray on the way there. Going alone was dangerous, because devils might tear you apart.
The church never trusted the place. Icons were never hung in a banya, and people took off their belt and their cross at the door, which they did nowhere else. In the twelfth century the archbishop of Novgorod scolded priests who said mass straight after bathing. In the sixteenth century the church excommunicated anyone who got bath water in their mouth on a fast day.
Russians heated the bathhouse on Saturday, the old Sabbath, and scholars have read the weekly bath as a rival sabbath sitting alongside the church. The old joke bends the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy: remember the Sabbath day, go to the bathhouse.
Why the Last Steam Round Belongs to the Bannik
A family heated the bathhouse once and then washed in turns, group after group. The spirit had his own turn at the end. In the Russian north three groups of bathers washed and the fourth round of steam was his, with warm water and a broom left out for him. Other villages put the line one step earlier and forbade the third round. The count changed from place to place, but the last heat of the day always went to him.
The manners of the bath were the same everywhere. Bathers kept quiet and never hurried the person inside, and a curse spoken in the steam was believed to come true. Afterwards, people said, you could hear the bannik washing in the empty bathhouse: a broom slapping wet boards, water splashing over the edge of a tub.
The rule about hurrying comes from a story. A man was washing inside the bathhouse. Another man outside shouted for him three times to come out, and a voice answered from inside: “No, I am only just flaying him.” They opened the door and found only the bather’s feet sticking out. The spirit had dragged him through a gap in the boards.
Leaving had its own formula. The last bather left hot and cold water and a piece of soap, kept every tub and bucket uncovered, and said aloud, “Wash yourself, master.” From then until morning the bathhouse was his.
Breaking the rules could kill you. One village answer from before 1914 is blunt about it: the bath spirit has iron arms, and he tortures to death anyone who comes to the bath without a blessing or around midnight, especially on holy days and at Christmas.
What Does a Bannik Look Like?
Mostly he was heard rather than seen. When he did show himself, he took one of two shapes. One was a huge black man, always barefoot, with iron hands and eyes like fire. The other was a small old man with a long beard. He could also come as a cat or a dog, and once as a horse’s head.
Many villagers saw the bannik as the house spirit in another room. The house spirit, the domovoi, lived behind the family stove. An English folklorist wrote in 1872 that the domovoi turns up wherever a fire is lit, and that in a bathhouse he goes by the name bannik. In his account the bannik dislikes people who bathe late at night and often suffocates them, especially if they skipped their prayer.
There is a female spirit of the bathhouse too, and she is a mistress in her own right. Her name is obderikha, which means roughly “the one who flays”. Her hair is long and loose, her teeth are large, and her eyes sit wide apart. She can turn into a cat or a monkey. When a newborn was stolen and an old bath broom lay in its place, she got the blame. The swap is the Russian version of an old European fear, in which fairies take a child and leave something else in the cradle.
The Black Hen Under the Threshold
A new bathhouse got an offering buried under it. The animal was a black hen. It was strangled, not cut, and buried with its feathers on under the threshold. The man who buried it then walked away backwards, bowing to the building.
Across Europe people buried animals under new buildings in the same way. For the banya, a chicken and a bow were enough. On ordinary days the spirit got a piece of rye bread with salt.
In the Russian north a ceremonial bread also carried the name bannik. It was baked for weddings, for births and for the first day of field work, which folds the bath and the meal into a single word.
A Bathhouse for Births and Weddings
The banya was used for much more than washing. Women gave birth there, because it was the warmest room on the farm. A new mother stayed in the bathhouse with her child for days, sometimes weeks, while neighbours brought food.
The first bath made the child a person. The midwife pressed the baby’s head into shape and said the words that went with it: straight now, you will not be a cripple. A boy’s umbilical cord was cut on an axe and a girl’s on a spindle, so that each would grow into the right kind of worker.
The mother counted as unclean for seven weeks. She had to take between three and nine baths before she could go back among people and back into church.
The bath also marked the calendar. Families heated it on the eve of the big holidays, above all on the Thursday before Easter. They heated it again before Kupala, the midsummer night of St John, when the fern flower blooms in the legend.
A bride went to the bath on the day before her wedding, usually a Saturday, and in some districts the groom went too. After a funeral, mourners went to the bath to wash off their grief, and a bath was heated for the dead as part of remembering them. The South Slavs had their own nights when the dead come home.
How Girls Read Their Future Husband’s Hand
The bathhouse was also where a girl went to find out whom she would marry, and the method was physical. During the twelve days after Christmas she went out to the banya at night. She lifted her skirt and pushed her bare backside through the half-open door. The bannik was supposed to touch her. A furry hand meant a rich husband. A bare, clawed hand meant a poor marriage and a hard mother-in-law.
The test lasted into living memory. In 2007 an old woman in a village of the Nizhny Novgorod region put it in one sentence: if he grabs you with a hairy hand the groom will be rich, with a bare one, poor. Other villages used wood ash instead. A girl spread it beside the bathhouse, wished for her future groom and read the footprint. A boot print meant a rich groom, a bast-shoe print a poor one.
There was real fear in it. In 1976 a university folklore expedition heard a story about a young man who took a bet. He was to go into the bathhouse at midnight and take a stone off the stove. A hairy hand caught his arm, and his heart gave out there in the bathhouse.
What Happened to the Bannik
The word bannik itself belongs mostly to books. In recent field interviews many villagers did not know it. They had their own names for him: the bath master, the bath herdsman, or simply the bath one. In a few southern villages the bath spirit even took the names of female creatures, among them the forest witch Baba Yaga.
He has also faded. A collection of village stories printed in 2007 held 233 about the house spirit and only 27 about the bath spirit. In newer recordings the bannik has lost his face and his job. He has merged with the devil, or shrunk into a story for scaring children, and the people who tell it laugh at it. A woman in the village of Khokhloma, recorded in 2008, laughed in the middle of her answer: something used to appear in the bathhouse, that is what they said even earlier.
Sources
- Повесть временных лет (Tale of Bygone Years), Laurentian text, translated by D. S. Likhachev. The bathhouse passages stand in the undated introduction (the apostle Andrew at Novgorod, the source of the quotation in the body) and under the year 6453 (Princess Olga and the Derevlyan envoys). Russian full text consulted at hrono.ru/dokum/1000dok/povest1.php.
- Masha Vadeysha, ‘The Russian Bathhouse: The Old Russian Pert’ and the Christian Bania in Traditional Culture’, Folklorica: Journal of the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Folklore Association 10, no. 2 (2005), 26-43, DOI 10.17161/folklorica.v10i2.3761.
- Elena E. Levkievskaya, Мифы русского народа (Myths of the Russian People), Moscow: AST, 2000, chapter ‘Банник и обдериха’ (The Bannik and the Obderikha). The flaying scene, the third-round rule and the black hen are recorded in this chapter. Text consulted at booksite.ru/fulltext/myt/hsr/uss/kih/8.htm.
- Yulia M. Shevarenkova, ‘Банник в современной устной нижегородской традиции: мифологический и лингвистический аспекты образа’ (The Bannik in the Modern Oral Tradition of the Nizhny Novgorod Region), Вестник Марийского государственного университета 17, no. 1 (2023), 128-135, DOI 10.30914/2072-6783-2023-17-1-128-135. Source of the field recordings quoted in the body (the hairy-hand sentence of 2007, the ash test, the 1976 bet and the 2008 answer from the village of Khokhloma), each printed there with place, year and informant. Field recordings of 1976-2012 from the folklore archive of Lobachevsky State University.
- D. K. Zelenin, Описание рукописей Ученого архива Императорского Русского географического общества (Catalogue of the Manuscripts of the Learned Archive of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society), Petrograd, 1914-1916. The statement about the bath spirit’s iron arms stands at page 263 of the 1914 volume, and reaches English readers through Vadeysha’s article.
- William R. S. Ralston, The Songs of the Russian People, as Illustrative of Slavonic Mythology and Russian Social Life, London: Ellis and Green, 1872, pages 122-123.
- K. K. Loginov, Семейные обряды и верования русских Заонежья (Family Rites and Beliefs of the Russians of Zaonezhye), Petrozavodsk: Karelian Scientific Centre, 1993, page 96, on the round of steam left for the bannik.
- G. K. Zavoiko, ‘В костромских лесах по Ветлуге-реке’, Труды КНОИМК 8 (1917), pages 35-38, for the bathhouse said to be seven versts away and for the water and broom left for the bath spirit.
- S. B. Adon’eva and O. A. Ovchinnikova, Традиционная русская магия в записях конца ХХ века, St Petersburg, 1993, pages 30-31, for the entry and departure formulas.
- Nancy Condee, ‘The second fantasy mother, or all baths are women’s baths’, in Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (eds), Russia, Women, Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, pages 3-30, on the Saturday bath as an alternate sabbath.
- W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia, Stroud: Sutton, and University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.
- Ye. A. Ajbabina and O. I. Nekrasova, ‘Names of the bathhouse spirits in the dialects of the Komi-Zyryan language’, Vestnik ugrovedenia / Bulletin of Ugric Studies 13, no. 1 (52) (2023), 7-14.
- Yemelyan Korneev (drawings), Les peuples de la Russie, ou description des moeurs, usages et costumes des diverses nations de l’Empire de Russie, Paris: D. Colas, 1812-1813, plate ‘Le Bain russe’. Auction catalogues note when a copy includes this plate (Christie’s, 2006).
- John Augustus Atkinson, ‘Hot Bath’, hand-coloured etching with aquatint, from A Picturesque Representation of the Manners, Customs, and Amusements of the Russians, 3 vols, London 1803-1804.
- Vasily Perov, Накануне девичника. Проводы невесты из бани (On the Eve of the Hen Party: Seeing the Bride Off from the Bath), 1870, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
