Liquid Assets

Russia and the European spa culture

In the summer of 1887, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky spent just over three weeks in the spa town of Borzhom in the Tiflis Province of the Russian Empire.[1] Shortly after leaving Borzhom, the Russian composer reflected on his stay at the spa in a letter to opera singer Emilia Pavlovskaya, commenting: “I do feel that Borzhom is one of the most bizarrely wonderful places in the whole world.”

For Tchaikovsky, Borzhom was a place apart, a community peculiarly detached from the real world. This was not unique to Borzhom. Tchaikovsky would have encountered much the same atmosphere in other spas around the tsarist empire, made to emulate their famous European predecessors like Carlsbad. Whether in the Caucasus, the Crimea or the Baltics, their atmosphere is still the hallmark of the traditional European spas so very popular with Russian visitors today.

Tchaikovsky used his time in Borzhom to good effect, taking the waters as prescribed by his doctor and working on the orchestration for his Suite No. 4 (Mozartiana). So he worked, to be sure, but at a different tempo. The clocks run slower in spa towns. It is that sense of time having stalled, of being in a refuge where the worries of everyday life are kept at bay, that makes such places so enduringly popular. The spa is a sanctuary, though whether it promotes more the betterment of the body or the soul is open for debate.

The spa opens up an entirely new reality, one replete with possibilities – some of which may be more sensual than medicinal. A significant percentage of those in search of the recuperative qualities of spas travel alone (although Tchaikovsky took his younger brother Anatoly with him to Borzhom). Thus, spas offer rich opportunities for flirting. Visitors to Borzhom and other spas in the Caucasus region in the nineteenth century could simultaneously explore the borderlands of Russia and the borderlands of decorum. In the theatrical world of the spa town, the stage is populated by transients – for all spa therapies do eventually run their course, and the day must come when the players return to their normal lives with healthy looks and lots of discretion.

Yet, however discreet the spa visitor might be, the wider Russian public was fully aware of what went on at spa resorts. Alexander Shakhovskoy’s 1815 stage comedy Lesson to Coquettes (Урок кокеткам, или Липецкие воды) was the opening salvo in a literary battle between cautious conservatives and Russian Romantics but, for the public who packed theaters to see the play, it was a chance to see the antics played out at the new spa at Lipetsk (which opened in 1805). As it happens, the spa at Lipetsk quickly declined to become a mere footnote in balneological history, but the cultural debate opened by Shakhovskoy ebbed and flowed for many years. The spa, even one reproduced in a theater, was a place for indiscretions of all types, a bounded territory where it was possible to utter sentiments that might have no place in Petersburg salons. Vasily Zhukovsky, the Romantic poet whose work was parodied in Lesson to Coquettes, used an appropriate water metaphor in describing the tide of acrimony as “the Lipetsk flood.”

The spa colonnades, like this one at Mariánské Láznĕ, where guests “take the waters” are the most distinctive architectural feature of Bohemian spa towns.

The spa became a leitmotif in Russian literature. The longest of the five novellas that make up Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time is set in a spa in the Caucasus.[2] Spas are places to look for lovers and they are equally places to get over troubled relationships. In Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Kitty takes refuge in a German spa as she tries to recover after being humiliated by Vronsky.

A wonderful attribute of spas is the sheer ambiguity of everything. Is the couple walking in dressing gowns past the colonnade mere casual acquaintances or are they lovers? Where lies the boundary between health and illness? Are amorous entanglements themselves a part of the therapeutic regime? Spa towns are like Carnival in Rio or Mardi Gras in New Orleans – situations where the normal rules of engagement are suspended.

It is no surprise that spa life and its aftermath have so powerfully influenced writers and filmmakers. Chekhov’s short story, The Lady with the Lapdog, the first half of which is set in a health retreat at Yalta in Crimea, nicely exploits the theme. Yet the ambiguities surrounding a stay at a spa are most famously (and enigmatically) captured in Alain Resnais’ 1961 film L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad), shaped around a spa town in Bohemia that has long appealed to the Russian market – and which for devotees of fin-de-siècle stucco and fading kaisergelb is still one of the most appealing of European spa towns.[3]

The earliest Russian visitors to spas had of necessity to make long journeys to reach their preferred resort. The most illustrious spas were all difficult to reach. One might attribute this merely to geologic or hydrologic conditions that favored mountain regions rather than flatter terrain when it came to the prevalence of thermal springs, but distance and remoteness brought their own virtues. A spa cure required detachment from everyday life and there was no surer way of ensuring such detachment than by having a long journey to the chosen resort. Spas were also deeply enmeshed with the entire imperial project. It was military men working in the service of the tsar who first realized the therapeutic potential of water from artesian springs in and around the mountains of the Caucasus regions.[4] And soon a steady stream of civilians were making their way south to sample the same pleasures.[5]

Before the discovery of mineral springs around the margins of the empire, Russians would travel to spas in central Europe – and many of those spas are enduringly popular with Russian visitors today. Alexei Petrovich, the son of Peter the Great, set the trend with his 1710 visit to Carlsbad, the spa town in the Bohemian hills now known as Karlovy Vary. It was during that stay in Carlsbad that the tsarevich met his future wife, Princess Charlotte of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel – a useful re–minder that a spa cure might yield matrimonial as well as medicinal benefits.

Peter the Great himself visited Carlsbad the following year. It was a journey prompted more by a wish to attend his son’s wedding (held at Torgau in Saxony, just 100 miles north of Carlsbad) than any particular health worry. Peter did exactly what many subsequent generations of Russian visitors to Carlsbad have done: namely, he drank copious quantities of water. So much so that Peter recorded in a letter that “our bellies are swelled up with waters, because we drink like horses and there is nothing else to do.” The entire experience cannot have been so very bad, as in the ensuing months Peter the Great visited a number of German spas, and in 1712 he had a second extended stay at Carlsbad.

Peter’s evident affection for Carlsbad has served as the spa’s trump card over the last 200 years. A steady stream of Romanovs and other members of Russia’s elite followed in Peter’s wake. Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna (daughter-in-law of Tsar Paul) had no less than seven sojourns in Carlsbad. The Russian legacy in Carlsbad is symbolized in the woodland walks to the west of the town, which are among the finest surrounding any European spa town. They climb up steeply to a viewpoint where Peter the Great is said to have come each morning to pray. A cross and a monument recalling Romanov connections with Carlsbad mark the spot.

Memorial in Karlovy Vary (formerly Carlsbad) that recalls visits to the Bohemian spa town by a score of Romanovs during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The belvedere so favored by Peter the Great is a good place to take stock of modern Karlovy Vary, a spa that still retains much of the character and style of yesteryear. The winding valley of the River Teplá gives definition to the spa. Along the bottom of the valley, water from a number of hot springs is piped to taps in the spa colonnades. Mere mortals can barely identify any differences in taste between the springs, though there are clear differences in temperature. But those participating in the theater of Carlsbad profess their total commitment to the therapeutic regime that has been prescribed for them. No longer does this require drinking the vast quantities of water that were recommended in Peter the Great’s day, but “taking the waters” is still the central element of many spa cures in the traditional health resorts of central Europe. And the miracle of water is that it is free. Mud baths, massages and a range of diagnostic tests and medical procedures all come with a price tag, but the liquid asset that underpins spa life is bountiful and free.

The water that bubbles from the town’s artesian springs is, it must be said, the only thing in modern Karlovy Vary that has no price tag. More than any other of the spa towns of Bohemia, Karlovy Vary is a place dedicated as much to commerce as to health. The town has the most persuasively Russian streetscapes of any town in the European Union, and most of the assertive signage in Cyrillic script on the streets of Karlovy Vary is dedicated to getting Russian visitors to part with their rubles (which are the currency of choice here).

The coupling of health and commerce is of course not unique to Karlovy Vary. One of the appeals for Russians of a visit to the early Caucasus spas was the opportunity to buy souvenirs that were simply unavailable in Moscow. When Mikhail Lermontov arrived in Pyatigorsk in 1837, his first thought was to go shopping. He purchased Circassian slippers.

But not all who travel to Karlovy Vary are seduced by shopping. Ruslan, from Yekaterinburg, is busy doing push-ups in a woodland glade up the hillside and beyond the monument to Peter the Great. He appreciates that day-to-day life at a spa is a programmed sequence of routines that depict various valences of well-being or ill health. Breathlessly, for his push-ups cannot be interrupted, Ruslan explains that his wife has taken the funicular up to the Diana Café atop the mountain. “I’ll be running up there in just a few moments,” he says. Ruslan does not look like a man who needs medical attention. “No, for us the trip to Karlovy Vary is more a chance to just relax. Everyone here speaks Russian, menus are in Russian. And, yes, we do take the waters and even a treatment or two. It’s all very easy because Russian is very much the working language of the spa.”

With that, he is off, bounding up the hillside for a sweaty rendezvous with his wife at the Diana Café. Many of the Russians who today fill the streets of Karlovy Vary tell tales of how the town has adapted to the post-Soviet world. Some have been coming for years, others recall how their parents came to the town during the Cold War years.

Personally, I first visited Karlovy Vary 30 years ago. I met with friends in Lenin Square, which in those days had a fine bronze bust of Vladimir Ilyich in the center of the town square. We walked south to the Grand Hotel Moskva for coffee. The bilateral links between the then Czechoslovak spa town and Moscow were very evident, even though they had been tarnished by the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. That violation of Czechoslovak sovereignty by the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact states might have spelled the end for the spa trade in Karlovy Vary. The flow of visitors faltered but then recovered.

Taking the waters in the early 1970s acquired more than just curative meaning: it was treatment for the individual with a wider symbolism for the body politic. Visitors from the Soviet Union to Czechoslovakia were cultural and political ambassadors. Sharing the pains and pleasures of spa treatments allowed Soviet and Czechoslovak citizens to draw closer. A relationship that had been strained during the Prague Spring and its aftermath was patched up by massages and mineral baths. The drawing together of the people of the two states was a fine example of the principle of sblizhenie, a piece of ideological rhetoric that underpinned the new rapprochement between Moscow and Prague enshrined in a May 1970 friendship treaty.

With relations restored, Karlovy Vary seemed to become ever more like a smart suburb of Moscow. The two cities even shared a film festival, Moscow running the event in odd-numbered years and Karlovy Vary playing host in even-numbered years. Now the film festival runs every year in Karlovy Vary, Lenin Square has been renamed, and the Grand Hotel Moskva has been privatized, reverting along the way to its previous name, Grand Hotel Pupp, recalling the eighteenth-century confectioner who once brought much-needed investment and good cakes to the town’s finest hostelry. Yet the renaming of hotels and the moving of statues has hardly dented the town’s Russian demeanor. The cadence of Russian voices seals the city’s soundscape and there’s the taste of Russia in the caviar and blini served in Karlovy Vary’s best restaurants.

There was a time when Soviet technological prowess gave a new dimension to spa routines here. A new, modernistic colonnade, opened in 1975, was named in honor of Yuri Gagarin. The Vrídelní kolonáda Jurije Gagarina (Yuri Gagarin Hot Spring Colonnade) provided an important all-weather facility, allowing spa visitors to take the waters in indoor comfort, thus extending the spa season into periods of the year with less clement weather. There was a statue of Karl Marx inside the building, and an oversized sculpture of Yuri Gagarin, ten feet high and clad in a silver cosmonaut’s suit, stood at the entrance to the colonnade. With the reordering of loyalties in the Czech Republic over the last 20 years, Marx has disappeared from the indoor colonnade and the Gagarin statue was moved out of town. It now stands outside the passenger terminal at Karlovy Vary airport.

Karlovy Vary may be the European spa that can boast the strongest suite of historical connections with the Romanovs, but it has rivals. Just a few miles away is Mariánské Lázně (previously known as Marienbad), where a striking Orthodox church attests to a strong Russian connection. The church is a star attraction on account of its unusual porcelain iconostasis, made at Russia’s famous Kuznetsov Porcelain Works and shown at the World Fair in Paris in 1900. The spa facilities at Mariánské Lázně are still very popular with Russian guests who want to avoid the crowds of Karlovy Vary.[6] A third spa in the immediate area is Františkovy Lázně (one-time Franzensbad), a tiny community dedicated to rest and recuperation and so picture-perfect that those sent there by their doctors for a cure might well wonder if they have died and gone to Heaven.

The visit in 1821 of Tsar Alexander I to Bardejovské Kúpele in the Carpathian Mountains demonstrated that there was no need to travel all the way to Bohemia to find a Habsburg-style spa. The health resort already enjoyed royal endorsement. It was a favorite of Marie Louise, the daughter of the Austrian Emperor and second wife of Napoleon Bonaparte. But Tsar Alexander’s visit promoted the spa to a new market. Bardejovské Kúpele has remained consistently popular with Russian visitors to this day and, in its setting in the hills of northern Slovakia, it remains one of the most pleasing of central Europe’s small spa towns, one made all the better by having within its confines a beautiful collection of wooden buildings from across the Carpathian region. It gives the spa a strong regional identity. And the use each Sunday morning of the Orthodox liturgy in the wooden church in the heart of Bardejovské Kúpele probably leads some guests to assume that they have stumbled into a deeply rural part of Russia (although the church is actually part of the Slovakian Greek-Catholic confession).

With the growing interest in spa culture among the middle classes in late Imperial Russia, new spas closer to the major cities began to develop. Two that have stood the test of time are Druskininkai (south-west of Vilnius) and Narva-Jõesuu, on the coast of the Gulf of Finland just an hour west of St. Petersburg. Both still have ornate spa gardens, forest settings and a real sense of being a place apart.

In the pre-railway era, the difficulties of reaching spas in the winter months placed natural limits on the spa season. But towards the end of the nineteenth century the spa trade lengthened. During the twentieth century, excess capacity in the low season, coupled with that not-quite-of-this-world quality of many spa towns, made them favored venues for chess tournaments, academic conferences and cultural congresses. Representatives of the fraternity of socialist nations were to be found having earnest discussions against a backdrop of atlantes and caryatids.

The legacy of woodcarving and sculpture competitions from the Soviet period can be seen in spa towns across Russia and eastern Europe. A very good example, one that nowadays seems quite incongruous, are the carved travertine sculptures by artists from 16 nations (but predominantly from the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia) around the spa at Vyšné Ružbachy in eastern Slovakia.

The Church of the Protection of the Holy Mother of God was built in the village of Mikulášová in 1730, and was subsequently moved to the nearby spa town of Bardejovské Kúpele.

Russian army officers looking for recuperation and social diversion were among the first clients of the spas that developed around the margins of the Russian Empire. But the practice of sending officers to spas outlived Imperial Russia. During the Cold War period, the lakeshore resort of Bad Saarow in East Germany provided a secluded getaway for Soviet army officers. It is remarkable how Bad Saarow has adapted to a new political piety, but a Russian connection persists. Today’s visitors dutifully photograph the striking Russian-style wooden villa where Maxim Gorki once stayed.

Spas are like theater. Governments come and go, but the show must go on. One hundred years ago, the behavior of Russian guests at Bohemian spas was lampooned by the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem in his novel Marienbad: “Their clothes, their finery and showing off to one another. Those hats and the jewelry and the lace.... They’re everywhere.”

All the world may be a stage, but when it comes to spa towns in Bohemia, Georgia and even in the Carpathians, Russians are far more than bit players. RL

A Sip of the Caucasus

Spa waters are free at the point where they bubble out of the ground, and in that very fact lies great business potential. Water with curative potential sells well, and entrepreneurs were quick to spot a market. Waters from spas popular in the tsarist period were often sold in Russian cities. To sit in Petrograd and sip water from Pyatigorsk or Yessentuki, both early spas in the North Caucasus region, was a vicarious pleasure, one that bridged the gap between two worlds. As, in the course of the nineteenth century, spa scenes became strongly embedded in Russian literature, affection for mineral waters imported from distant spas developed into much more than just a matter of quenching thirst. A mere drink might evoke “a silver chain of snow-clad summits,” à la Lermontov. Such sentiments were surely laced with added poignancy after Lermontov’s death in a duel in Pyatigorsk.

Spas competed to become the Vichy of the Caucasus, and the clear winner was Borzhom. Its water bottling plant, set up by a Romanov grand duke, still makes a decent profit by exporting Borjomi water to three dozen countries. The distinctive bottles of mineral water appear on tables across much of the post-Soviet world, although in Russia imports of Georgian water were banned for several years. Even without their Borjomi, however, Russians could still enjoy bottled mineral water from the Caucasus, such as Arkhyz or Yessentuki, named after the towns where springs are located. Borjomi was recently allowed back onto the market, as Russia’s relations with Georgia began to thaw.

NOTES

1. Today the resort is known as Borjomi, and it lies in the territory of the Republic of Georgia.

2. Titled Princess Mary, the fifth novella is set in Pyatigorsk and includes a duel scene that anticipates the manner of Lermontov’s own death in a duel.

3. Marienbad (today known as Mariánské Lázně) is one of several spa towns in the northwest corner of the Czech Republic – the region known as Bohemia. The most celebrated of them is Carlsbad (Karlovy Vary). All the Bohemian spas were developed under the patronage of the Habsburg monarchy.

4. In the case of Sochi, the decision to remake it into a spa town was partly due to the need to repopulate and develop the region after the native population was driven out, following the end of the Caucasus war.

5. The relevance of sacred springs can also not be overlooked. See for instance, the article on page 54.

6. And the spa was popular with Russian writers as well. Gogol visited, as did Goncharov; Turgenev preferred Karlovy Vary.

If you found this article interesting, then you may enjoy two books that helped inform it: Russia at Play by Louise McReynolds and Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism, a collection of essays edited by Anne Gorsuch and Diane Koenker. Both books are published by Cornell University Press.