Things to see and do in Bohemia Czech Republic

Take a trip through Bohemia´s central park, past the bandstand with its elegant wooden patterns, the path runs to the left of the Catholic church (locked except on Sundays) and past the former Hotel Kreuz, with its creeper-covered balcony, onto the main road of the spa. This is another leafy avenue which boasts on the left the tedok office, where accommodation can be arranged, and on the right a splendid house where Beethoven stayed in 1812.

The black and gold plaque in Teutonic script records the precise date, while inside, an empire mirror and an unusual portrait of the composer, clearly installed shortly afterwards, are as touching a memorial to him as anything to be found in the countless Beethoven museums of Austria and Germany.

Further down from this house is the Hotel Slovan, one of the few boarding houses which are open to western travellers. Although drastically restored in the seventies, the eccentric caryatids on the staircase ceilings have been lovingly preserved.

The Francis Spring Bohemia

At the end of this avenue is the chief drinking well, the so-called Francis spring, named after that severe emperor who was the last Habsburg to wear the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. The spring stands under a Greek Doric rotunda filled with gleaming polished brass pipes. On one side runs the colonnade whose columns provide very necessary shelter from what seem in June to be constant thunderstorms.

During the morning the columns are lined with walkers sipping water from porcelain jugs with long spouts, but in the evening they are generally as quiet as a Greek temple. The only permanent character is a snarling bust of Lenin, whose demonic expression is not in the slightest mollified by the lush flower-beds surrounding him.

On the other side of the spring is a large hall known as the casino though gambling rarely takes place in its grand saloons. Instead it serves as a general meeting place for lectures and rallies. It is an unfortunate fact of life in Czechoslovakia that even on holiday the ominous rhetoric of communism continues to thunder its phrases out of strategically placed loudspeakers. In Franzensbad, this usually starts at about 7.45 am., diluted by sequences, interminably repeated, of some Tchaikovsky plano concerto.

This can be escaped by following the road round the back of the casino to the evangelical church, past the faded signs of old pension houses, which were named after towns in the Austrian empire. The road running along the edge of the park from here leads to the gaudily restored Russian church which, like most Russian churches, boasts a picturesque assortment of domes. Beyond it, on the Kollarova is an impressive conservatory restaurant belonging to one of the dums: At the end of the Kollarova is the theatre, a cu'rious early twentieth-century building made up of cubist motifs which are strangely jarring in this more classical setting of park and villas.

A few minutes' walk through the park leads to the former Villa Imperiale, a picturesque building, horribly gutted inside but doubtless, judging by the row of West German cars parked outside, a comfortable place to stay.

From here an avenue of oaks leads to the rather Parisian-looking former Kaiserbad, another temple dedicated to water, which bubbles between the polished brass pipes. A bust nearby commemorates Dr Adler, one of the spa's most eminent physicians, who was responsible for discovering many of the potent cures to be found in the waters around here.

Beyond these yellow baths is a small stream. The deserted grass around it is a frequent playground for rabbits, especially at dusk. Across the stream, a straight path leads uphill to a fork. The left turning brings the walker immediately into the country, for Franzensbad, unlike Marienbad and Carlsbad, is not hemmed in by narrow valleys.

The Bohemian foothills

The route, indicated by red and white markers, provides a series of panoramic views of the Bohemian foothills. All that is lacking, as the road runs down to village ponds and up to deserted crossroads, is a pub or hostelry - the houses are mostly quiet buildings with little to invite the stranger across their thresholds.

A second walk, in the opposite direction to this and with a cafe at the end of it, runs from the Rush near the former Kaiserbad towards the railway. After passing underneath two railway bridges, the path runs uphill and is marked by a series of red hearts through the woods, which lead ultimately to a small cafe surrounded by trees and the scent of acacia.

From Franzensbad, there are frequent buses to Marienbao, that favourite spa of Edward VII who, both as king and as Prince of Wales, insisted on spending much of his summer at this unpretentious town. Unlike Franzensbad, it lies in a charming valley enclosed on three sides by pine-clad hills.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the region was still an impenetrable wilderness. Then the springs which belonged to the nearby abbey of Tepl were found by various eminent men of medicine to possess curative qualities, and development began. Villas shot up, hotels appeared and with the visits of such fashionable European royalty as Prince Edward this small spa became for a few weeks each year the centre of European diplomacy, as foreign ministers from Vienna and St Petersburg came to take the waters between intense discussions in their respective hotels with the private secretaries of any convalescent royalty present.

Marienbad trips

It was at Marienbad that Edward tried on occasions to detach the Austrian emperor, Franz Josef,that aged bastion of the old order, away from Germany and the steadfast alliance between the two empires which was to have such disastrous consequences for Europe in 1914. Of all this diplomatic activity, there is little to remind us in today's Marienbad. Above the boulevard stands the first of two poignant relics of Marienbad's Edwardian past, the English church.

It is as melancholy a sight as anything to be seen in Central Europe-its tracery bare save for a few fragments of Clayton and Bell glass left in the west end's rose window, its pews ripped out, its walls scribbled Upon. At the time of writing the vestry door is conveniently absent, so that this most maudlin of Victorian ruins can be examined at will.

Inside, the light shines through onto the only decorative objects to have survived intact, a memorial plaque to Edward VII, 'Emperor of India by grace of God'. Next to it some Czech wag has scribbled 'God Save the Queen'. Where once a monarch and his entourage regularly worshipped, there remains only dust and decay.

This is a sombre way to begin a visit to a spa, but the rest of the town is far from cheering. The Russian church further down the road above the English church is in rather more robust state, but its colours are so vulgar as to seriously inhibit any enjoyment of it. From here the road leads down to the principal square of the town.

Each of the small hotels has wood-panelled rooms which have remained unchanged for decades, and a small yellow theatre off to the left has retained its stuccoed interior.
To the right, along the top of a leafy embankment, rises the most impressive structure in the entire town: the long winding colonnade which, with its magnificent iron columns, could easily be the work of the ubiquitous Helmer and Fellner partnership.

Inside, the scores of walkers sipping water as they perambulate up and down cut a grotesque figure. Each one holds a small china tea-pot from whose nozzle the healing waters are periodically sucked in the way people chew on pipes. The arcade itself has been ruthlessly restored. Where once it was possible to walk on stone, there is only linoleum. Where paintings hung on the walls, there are now only ugly bronzes. As a laconic comment on this state of affairs, the face of the nineteenth¬century clock has slid round, so that the numeral six is where twelve normally stands.

A fine yellow villa opposite restores some hope. It boasts the only facade in Central Europe which has a three-dimensional representation in stucco of an American steam-engine. This and an abandoned pair of kettle-drums in the centre are perhaps the more memorable sights of this colonnade, which once saw a portly King of England amble along surrounded by the excited and curious eyes of hundreds of onlookers. But then today the arcade is named after Maxim Gorki rather than a Habsburg archduke.

At the end of the colonnade there is at the time of writing a large building site. The earnest spa officials proudly proclaim that this will soon be the grandest and noblest of all the springs, but a model of the design suggests that whatever fills this hole will be completely out of tune with the classical architecture around it.

To the right of this is the bronze statue of the Abbot Reitenberger (d. 1860), who, like Dr Joseph Neyr, whose wizened features are com¬memorated nearby in a bronze bust, did much to promote the prosperity of the baths. On a small square on the other side of the colonnade rises the large imposing Catholic church, an uninspired work of the 1840s, usually open during the week.

Behind it, across another square, stands the second surviving link with King Edward, the former Hotel Weimar (now the Hotel Kafka), where the monarch would put up during his sojourns here. It is almost inconceivable that the rooms of this unpretentious establishment once resounded to the talk of state secrets.

The painting which once hung in its dining room depicting the 'Uncle of Europe' on one of his strolls through the colonnades has disappeared, while the memorial statues in the nearby garden depicting the Austrian emperor and the English king also seem to have been lost. Only over the main entrance does the Gothic script of old German plaque recall the illustrious personage who enjoyed rooms on the first floor during the town's Edwardian summers.

The Spa Museum


Next to the hotel is the spa museum, a curious building containing on its first floor the remains of Goethe's house - the poet still enjoys the authorities' esteem - with the furniture on which the master wrote during his frequent stays here a few generations before King Edward. On the ground floor, a bird's-eye panorama view of the spa shows the English church in all its old glory, while rooms to the right contain a thin collection of Marienbadalia, with nothing which even remotely refers to the heady diplomatic life of the town in the early 1900s. A series of portraits of the spa's doctors, earnest and well groomed, is well displayed, while behind another case are a number of old biscuit tins which once held the famous Oblaten, those large thin wafers which are the great speciality of the region and which even today are delicious when found at their best (that is in tins rather than packets).

From the museum, various paths run up to the Hamelika hills, passing Beaux-Arts-style baths, including the remarkable Moor's bath, whose interior is still a riot of nineteenth-century arts-and-crafts decor. Of the many paths which thread the pine forest here, that above the Pod Panoramou leading to the Cafe Miramonte is perhaps the favourite.

The Bohemian Hills and mountains

It passes several interesting viewpoints, including one which, according to a plaque, was frequented by Goethe. Above the Miramonte, the summit of the hill offers views of the Bohemian hills and mountains. The former 'Kaiser Tower' has been rather crudely adapted to this century and, like so many things which recall empires and monarchies in this part of the world, renamed.

From here a path marked by yellow finger-posts winds its way slowly down to the Cervena Karkulka, a restaurant surrounded by woods which is a favourite eating place of the spa guests, who then return to the town centre by way of the Rudolf spring.