# In the 1630s a German envoy, Adam Olearius, travelled through Livonia, in today's Latvia and Estonia, on an embassy to Moscow and Persia.

- Series: [Saunantakaa](https://miu.fm/saunantakaa.md)
- Published: 2026-10-09
- Page: https://miu.fm/saunantakaa/in-the-1630s-a-german-envoy-adam-olearius-travelled-through

## Story

In the 1630s a German envoy, Adam Olearius, travelled through Livonia, in today's Latvia and Estonia, on an embassy to Moscow and Persia. He watched the Finns who had settled there come out of their bathhouses in the coldest winter, run into the snow and rub themselves with it "as if it were Soap", then go back into the heat.

That is more than 150 years before Giuseppe Acerbi, the Italian with the thermometer in our first episode, saw Finns roll in the snow in 1799.

Would you scrub with snow?

Source: Adam Olearius, The Voyages and Travels of the Ambassadors sent by Frederick Duke of Holstein, to the Great Duke of Muscovy, and the King of Persia (English translation, London 1662), book III, p. 89. In the book, "stoves" means bathhouses.

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