Background
How erotic massage got from temple ritual to a street in Prague
A short history of the techniques on a modern salon menu, and where they actually came from.
Published 22 August 2026 · 2 min read
The treatments on a Prague salon menu have wildly different ages. One is genuinely ancient, one is a twentieth-century Japanese invention, and several were named by marketing departments. It is worth knowing which is which.
Tantra: old, and not what the name suggests
Tantra is a body of Indian religious practice dating back well over a thousand years, spanning Hindu and Buddhist traditions. It concerns ritual, breath, energy and the body as a route to a spiritual end — and the erotic element, while real, is a small part of a very large system.
What reaches a modern salon is a specific, secularised technique that borrows the pacing and the breathing work. Calling it 'ancient' is a stretch; calling it derived from something ancient is fair. The slowness, at least, is genuinely inherited.
Nuru: Japanese, and much newer than it sounds
Nuru comes from the sōpurando bathhouses of Kawasaki, and it is a twentieth-century development rather than a traditional practice. The word simply means slippery. The seaweed-derived gel that defines it was a practical innovation, and the technique was built around the material rather than the other way round.
Lingam: a Sanskrit word on a modern practice
The word is genuinely Sanskrit and genuinely tantric. The treatment as offered in European salons is a modern construction using tantric principles, largely formalised in the late twentieth century as part of the Western neo-tantra movement. That does not make it less effective — but it is not a lineage stretching back to a temple.
Body to body, foam, and the rest
These are contemporary and were named commercially. There is no tradition behind body to body; it is a straightforward description of a technique. That is not a criticism. A treatment does not work better for having a longer story attached to it, and the honest version is more useful to a guest than an invented pedigree.
How Prague ended up with a sector
Three things converged after 1989: a permissive legal framework in which salons rent rooms to independent masseuses, a compact and extremely walkable historic centre, and a very large volume of visitors. The result is a concentration of venues in the Old Town that has few equivalents in Europe, and a market competitive enough that the good places compete on rooms, honesty and pricing rather than on advertising alone.
Which is, in the end, the reason a page like this exists at all.
