NEW YORK -- What does it say about a culture when one of its most honored rituals involves thrashing the body? Can we read it as a symbol of harsh Russian life, or does it speak more to a mentality -- ...

PHILADELPHIA — Grigory Konkin hurls a pail's worth of water into the huge, hellishly hot brick oven. Steam too hot to fog diffuses in the room as men and women in bathing suits file in. Banya veterans ...

MOSCOW (dpa) – Two dozen naked men groaning and flinching as they are fanned with steam and beaten with birch branches may not sound like the key to fitness, spirituality and inner calm. But the ...

In Russia, the legendary fierce winter starts to seem endless around this time of year. That helps explain Russians' abiding love for a central part of life — the sauna baths they call the banya. On ...