Not much has changed in the intervening years except the nationalities of the clientele. When Twain visited, the cream of European society came to Marianske Lazne for their cures. Emperor Franz Josef I and Czar Nicholas II were guests.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Edison all recuperated at Marianske Lazne. It was popular with composers, from Strauss, Chopin and Mahler to Wagner, who conceived "Lohengrin" while taking a cure here. Freud was a guest, and the German Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing was assassinated in the town by Nazi agents in 1933.
Germans dominated the guest list during World War II, when the surrounding region, the Sudetenland, was annexed by Hitler and the spa was called by its German name, Marienbad. They were supplanted by Russians during the Cold War, when what was then Czechoslovakia was a Soviet satellite. The town now draws Germans and Russians in roughly equal numbers.
But the legacy of those earlier, rigid societies remains in the various cures. At the Nove Lazne - the crown jewel of Marianske Lazne s grand old spa hotels - there is a room where nurses at fire hose-like nozzles pummel patients gripping a railing against a tiled wall six meters, or 20 feet, away with a high-pressure stream of water. Tomas Stransky, a manager at the hotel who has a crew cut and sports glossy eyeglasses with frames as big as windshields, goes wobbly when explaining the effect of the treatment.
"It is so good!" he insists with the accent and demeanor of Martin Short s character Franck Eggelhoffer, the wedding planner in the 1991 remake of "Father of the Bride." In another white, antiseptic room, patients inhale cold vapor from spring water, said to be good for asthma or bronchitis.
The hotel offers hot oil massages, mud baths and colonic irrigations. "Special for many Russians clients, because they have trouble with drinking and it s good for the liver," Stransky explains, sotto voce. In freshly painted pale yellow rooms reserved for dry carbon dioxide baths, a robust nurse pumps warm gas from one of the springs through a rubber hose into a garbage bag secured with a string around the patient s middle.
The gas smells faintly of cloves. As with many of the treatments, the brochure promoting this one promises "a significant improvement of sexual activities." The same gas is injected from a tank through a clear hose and a hypodermic needle into the skin to treat other disorders, including "heart ischemia," which your doctor will tell you is an inadequate supply of blood to the heart because of a blocked artery.
The prelate of a local monastery set up the first bungalow for spa guests here in 1805, and by midcentury the valley had undergone a building boom. It was renamed Marianske Lazne, or Mary s Bath, in honor of the Virgin Mary, whose picture hung near the prelate s original building. The valley is now filled with Art Nouveau and neoclassical houses, pergolas, pavilions and colonnades.
Spa guests still carry around the curious porcelain cups, mentioned by Twain, with handles that double as drinking straws for sipping water from any of the 12 springs. The Nove Lazne draws most of its water from the Caroline Spring, which has a high magnesium content that is said to help urological disorders, including kidney stones. Guests can also drink from what is called the 13th spring at the bar: Becherovka, a local herbal bitters.
Back to top Not much has changed in the intervening years except the nationalities of the clientele.
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