Karlovy Vary

Caving in before my sister’s foolhardy insistence, I agreed to go on a trip with her on the most inauspicious day possible. The interesting thing about my sister is that somehow, she always finds a weather forecast that says it will be sunny when all other forecasts predict rain. If prompted, she would no doubt be able to find a weather app that would tell us there isn’t a single cloud in the sky during a downpour.

All this is to say: today was a miserable day to visit Karlovy Vary, which, by all admissions, is a very pretty town in the West of the Czech Republic. Famed for its spas, Karlovy Vary (also known as Karlsbad in German) was named after Emperor Charles IV, who reportedly experienced its healing qualities during his stay in the vicinity. In subsequent centuries, the blossoming town would be visited by statesmen from all over Europe, including Peter the Great, Bismarck, and Ataturk, and artists like Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Goethe, Schiller, Mickiewicz, and Turgenev. Accordingly, Karlovy Vary abounds with churches of various confessions, including Roman Catholicism, Eastern Catholicism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Anglicanism.

These churches, along with springs and colonnades in various architectural styles, form the backbone of the town’s year-round tourist appeal. Once a year, however, Karlovy Vary hosts a film festival, which always attracts one or two foreign actors well past their prime. It takes place in the absolutely ghastly Hotel Thermal, a brutalist block built in the very centre of the town in the 1960s. If there is a petition to knock it down and build literally anything else in its place, I will sign it.

After spending a while in Karlovy Vary, we continued to Bečov nad Teplou. We had made a reservation to visit the chateau at noon to see the famous Reliquary of Saint Maurus, and made it just in time. Created in the 13^th century, the ornate artefact wound up in Bohemia in the 1880s, but the most interesting episode in its centuries-long history unfolded in the modern age.

Due to their cooperation with the Nazi regime, the reliquary’s owners had to leave Czechoslovakia at the conclusion of World War II, having buried the artefact beneath the chapel floor. Nothing was known of the artefact until 1984, when an American businessman offered Czechoslovak authorities 250 thousand dollars for the right to excavate and export an unspecified artefact. Naturally, the offer aroused suspicions, and a team of federal investigators managed to elicit enough information from the businessman (who had been recruited by the Beaufort family, the reliquary’s last owners) to find the reliquary themselves.

By the time we got to Bečov, it was already raining in earnest, so, having seen the reliquary, we cut our trip short and headed home.