Healing, fixing, making better: Carpathian health factories

The journey to the waters between the wars taught the geography of the new homeland, showed its beauty and helped build a national identity. Perhaps most significantly, however, after the First World War, spas were used to heal wounds and recover from trauma.

“If you make a queen now, he’ll take her immediately with bishop to c1, and you’ll take his bishop with your knight. But he’ll be moving his free pawn to d7 to threaten your rook, and even if you check with your knight you’ll lose — you’ll be done for in nine or ten moves. It’s almost the same as the combination that Alekhine introduced against Bogoljubov in the Pistyan Grand Tournament of 1922.

Astonished, McConnor let his hand drop from the piece and stared with no less awe than the rest of us at the man who had unexpectedly come to our aid like an angel from heaven. Anyone who could calculate a checkmate nine moves ahead had to be an expert of the first rank, perhaps even a competitor for the championship traveling to the same tournament. There was something supernatural about his sudden appearance and intervention at such a critical juncture.”[1]

This brilliant chess player from nowhere was Doctor B., an Austrian lawyer who decided to leave Europe because of the Nazi threat, and the game took place on a ship to South America. The protagonist of the “Chess Story” is the alter ego of the author, Stefan Zweig, a Viennese Jew forced to flee his homeland. This dark anti-fascist short story is a confrontation with failure and dives deep into the human mind. The writer completed it after leaving with his wife for Brazil; the Zweigs took their own lives shortly afterwards.

The work is not only a journey into the soul, but also a record of Zweig’s memories, starting from his youth. In the novella, Dr. B. mentions an international chess tournament in Piešťany in 1922, which was a continuation of a similar event held ten years earlier, organised under the Austro-Hungarian monarchy with the support of the Czechoslovak government and under the patronage of President Tomáš G. Masaryk. Before First World War, Piešťany, a Slovakian spa town just 150 kilometres from Vienna, was a popular weekend destination for residents of the Austrian capital. The town was already famous for its sulphurous hot springs in the 16th century, and in the 19th century the trips to the waters, formerly the privilege of the elite, became a pastime of the bourgeoisie as well. The resort reflected the changes taking place in both Vienna and Budapest; it was a projection of the dreams of a better life and health entertained by the wealthy societies of the Habsburg big cities. Those from Vienna travelled mainly to Pistyan, those from Budapest to Pöstyén; at least until the end of the World War I, the fewest trips were made to Piešťany.

To this day, one of the architectural dreams of the Austro-Hungarian bourgeoisie can be seen in Piešťany; it is the Thermia Palace Hotel, located on a river island and glittering with Art Nouveau luxury, from which a painting by Alphonse Mucha was stolen in 2000 (found four years later). The famous Czech painter used to visit both the town and this establishment, whose owner, Ľudovít Winter, he presented with a work entitled “Welcome to the Blessed Source of Health”, using an unusual pentagonal frame and adorning the hotel’s dining room, as a thank-you for his help in treating the artist’s daughter.

The Winter family had managed the spa since 1889, when its doyen, Alexander, leased it from the Erdődys, a Hungarian aristocratic family that had ruled Piešťany since 1778 and contributed to its development after the Napoleonic Wars and the flood of 1813. By the end of the 19th century, the town was growing no longer thanks to the Hungarian aristocracy, but thanks to the bourgeoisie from different corners of the monarchy, mainly from both capitals. The symbol of this change was Ľudovít Winter; it was during his reign that new developments were planned on the island in the middle of the Váh, where the Thermia, the crown jewel of the Piešťany lessees’ estate, was built. At the end of the First World War, the last ruler of the moribund Empire, Charles I, hosted German Emperor William II and Bulgarian Tsar Ferdinand I there. Five years later, this time at the Grand Hotel Royal, a famous chess competition was held, mentioned two decades later by Zweig.

The charm of the Slovak spa is engendered by the spectacular landscape of the mountain-surrounded valley formed by the Váh River – one of the routes from southern Europe towards Poland. Its rapid mountain stream springs at the foothills of the Tatras and then flows into the Danube at Komárno, forming the scenic axis of western Slovakia. Unlike the nearby Morava River, however, this watercourse did not lead to a pass or an isthmus like the Moravian Gate, but towards the highest peaks of the Carpathian Mountains.

Roman legionaries travelled along the Váh and set up the Laugaricio camp in 179 CE at the site of present-day Trenčín. As a reminder of this event, an inscription is carved into the rock below the local castle, one of the largest medieval fortresses:

VICTORIAE AVGVSTORV[m] EXERCITVS, QUI LAVGARICIONE SEDIT MIL[ites] L[egionis] II DCCCLV […] IANS LEG[atus] LEG[ionis] [Marcus Valerius Maxim]ian[u]s II AD[iutricis], CVR[avit] F[aciendum].

[In commemoration of the victory of the imperial legions wintering at Laugaricio with a force of 855 soldiers. The inscription was ordered to be made by the legate Marcus Valerius Maximianus].

The originator of this inscription was a Roman general, commander of the legions at the time of Marcus Aurelius, who went down in history for the wars fought in the late second century CE by the Romans against the Germanic tribes of Marcomanni and Quadi, living in what is now Bohemia and Slovakia, and was immortalised in pop culture in Ridley Scott’s Hollywood tentpole “Gladiator”. It was he who among the Roman chieftains reached the furthest north, marking the limes of his civilisation at Laugaricio. The site was also a limes in the 19th century, this time delimiting the bourgeois culture of burgeoning Vienna and Budapest; the town locals call Trenčín and outsiders call Trencsén or Trentschin is located about fifty kilometres north of Piešťany. People did not venture further into the Tatra Mountains.

At the end of the 19th century Trenčín (or Trencsén in Hungarian) also wanted to attract visitors. The hot sulphurous springs in Trenčianske Teplice were probably known already at the time of the Germans, while the first mention of them dates back to the 13th century, and their healing properties were described by the physician Tamás Jordan in 1585. The first spa facilities were already in operation, founded by the owners of the Trenčín fortress, the Hungarian princely family of Illésházy.

After the Napoleonic Wars, members of the bourgeoisie began arriving in Piešťany and Trenčianske Teplice, bringing along artistic and architectural ideas, at first timidly and unhurriedly, by stagecoach. In the second half of the century, when the railway reached Trenčín, history accelerated. The big change at Trenčianske Teplice was brought about by Baron Georg von Sina (actually Georgios Sinas), a Greek-born industrialist and banker who became rich thanks to the Napoleonic Wars. After the Congress of Vienna, this man from nowhere was already part of Vienna’s financial elite – his Sina Bank was the third largest in Austria; moreover, from 1826 onwards, this shrewd merchant headed the Imperial National Bank.

Von Sina used the funds accumulated through his dealings, stretching from Odessa to London, to invest in real estate, such as Vienna’s Sina Palace or extensive estates in various corners of the monarchy. He was aware of the opportunities arising from the development of long-backward Hungary – he was among the funders of the Chain Bridge, which, linking Buda and Pest, helped to create one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe at the time. The industrialist also left his mark on the architecture of the monarchy and its capital – while building his Viennese palace, he invited (from Greece) Theophil Hansen, a famous Danish architect who, after learning his trade in Berlin, decided to study ancient culture. He transplanted ancient and Moorish designs to Austro-Hungary, and his best-known works are the edifices inspired by the shape of Greek temples, including the Viennese Parliament and the Athens Academy, founded by von Sina’s son Simon.

Together with his sister, the financier’s son also inherited his father’s business in Trenčianske Teplice, owned by the family since 1835. Shortly thereafter, he built a spa park and drilled new springs, and in 1888, a Hammam-type Turkish bath was built through the efforts of his daughter Ifigénia de Castries d’Harcourt. The building, with its facades of light-coloured stone interlaced with bricks and decorated with domes typical of Middle Eastern architecture, was a rarity in Upper Hungary – this type of style had hitherto been reserved for synagogues. In the late 19th century, spa buildings were usually dressed in neo-Renaissance or neo-Baroque costume; folk motifs were also sometimes used. Ifigénia de Castries d’Harcourt, the wife of a French aristocrat and politician, is said to have been so enamoured of one spa establishment in Paris that she decided to build an identical one in her hometown of Trenčianske Teplice. It was designed by the Viennese architect Franz Schmoranz, while the decorations imitating Turkish ceramics came from the famous Zsolnay family factory in Pécs.

The heritage of the Austro-Hungarian Empire surprised with its splendour and opulence, mostly addressed to the mass taste of the wealthy bourgeoisie, especially in places such as the Carpathian spas. The result was almost always architectural kitsch, a finely crafted and precisely planned mainstay of the art from the age of steam and electricity.

The half-century preceding the fall of the monarchy was a golden age for Hungarians, but the nations over which they ruled had a very different view. Shortly after the Compromise of 1867, the eastern part of the empire saw a rapid expansion of railway lines, which reached, among other places, Trenčianske Teplice; at the same time, the Magyarisation of the region also began, which contributed to the birth of the Slovak national movement, followed by the construction of buildings with folk aesthetics and the formation of branches of the Sokol gymnastics societies. Quite soon it became clear that the Slovaks felt no gratitude towards the Magyars for their “civilising mission”; on the contrary, they considered them occupiers and colonisers.

Nowadays, it is not uncommon to see nostalgia for the times of Franz Joseph or admiration for the heritage of the Habsburg monarchy, including architecture. Taking a closer look at this culture and its buildings, we can easily see unhealed wounds and long-standing religious, national, and class conflicts. According to the Austrian architect Adolf Loos, who came from Moravia, the way to resolve them was to escape into the future. In his essay “Ornament and Crime”,[2] published in 1913, he described, promoting the rational, decoration-free architecture he knew from the United States, a society that was yet to come. He sincerely despised parochialism and folklore, and in rejecting ornament, he also rejected the feudalism, religion, and statehood enveloping the monarchy. The designer of Vienna’s famous “house without eyebrows” wanted to live in a country with an egalitarian and educated society regularly using the bathroom, and early-20th-century Austria was far from this ideal.

The sugar-coated world of Johann Strauss’s waltzes and the novels of Gyula Krúdy or Zweig fell apart in the autumn of 1918. After the birth of Czechoslovakia, people from Vienna and Budapest stopped coming to the Váh river – they were now separated from the sulphurous springs by borders, including linguistic and cultural ones. In the 1920s, Modernism arrived at Slovak spas – neo-Baroque and Art Nouveau were replaced by architecture that worshipped rational order and reserve, and jazz began to play instead of waltzes.

For the Czechoslovak state, this trend was more than just another artistic current. The new form of culture made it possible to express a modern identity, to portray the young state as an important place of reflection on the future, where reason and science stood above the prejudices and divisions of the past world. The new architecture was to dominate the skylines of Prague, Brno, Bratislava, and Košice, and would soon reach smaller towns as well, mostly in the form of public institution buildings and Baťa shoe shops. Modernism was to find its embodiments not only in the places where people worked and lived, but also in the spas, previously filled with representatives of the elite; now civil servants and the military were to take their place, and so was, alongside the upper classes, the emerging middle class, young people, or scouts, preferably wearing Baťa shoes.

The journey to the waters between the wars had yet another aspect: it taught the geography of the new homeland, showed its beauty and helped build a national identity. Perhaps most significantly, however, after the First World War, spas were used to heal wounds and recover from trauma – the legacy of the global conflict was countless victims and masses of traumatised cripples. Other post-war challenges included the Spanish flu pandemic, the famine-induced rise in tuberculosis cases, and the spectre of communism and attempts to keep the peace.

This new reality also entailed changes in ethical and aesthetic reflection – Modernism was a response to the trauma of war and the associated technological leap. Some scholars have already linked the birth of this trend to the battlefield experience of the movement’s most important figures, Walter Gropius or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It has been suggested that the simplicity, hospital whiteness, openness to the environment and greenery that characterised modernist edifices could have had a therapeutic effect on both their creators and occupants. The Bauhaus rejected traditional style, was fascinated by machinery and industrial reproduction, and drew on the play of colour patches and their intensities; new solutions were also sought by artists and architects from the countries created on the ruins of the Habsburg monarchy, such as Karel Čapek, who in his 1920 science-fiction drama R.U.R. (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti) described the birth of a robot, an artificial intelligence designed to serve humans.

Between 1930 and 1932, one of the symbols of the new era was built in Piešťany – the Colonnade Bridge (or Glass Bridge) over the River Váh with a simple reinforced concrete structure, connecting the town centre with the island and the local enclave of luxury, the Thermia Palace Hotel. Characteristic features of this river crossing – which serves both cars and pedestrians – are the modernist canopy and the double-strutted T-shaped pergola. The entrance to the bridge on the city side is decorated with the inscription “Surge et Ambula!” (Rise and Walk!) – words that, according to the Gospels of St Matthew and St Lucas, Christ addressed to the paralysed man. Now they were spoken to the citizens by the state – a modern demiurge resurrecting people to new life.

Also symbolic was Robert Kühmayer’s statue on the other side of the building, depicting a barlolámač, a young man crushing a crutch with his hands; it seems to suggest that thanks to the help of the young Czechoslovak state, the battle-wounded veteran can finally stand on his feet. The statue is adjacent to the hotel, an afterimage of a fallen monarchy whose history was ended by a war that brought death or disability to its subjects. Democratic Czechoslovakia wanted to offer its citizens life and health through modern technology, industry and medicine, and it was the Colonnade Bridge that was to express this idea. It was designed by a young Slovak architect, Emil Belluš, who, also symbolically, decided to settle in his native and more opportunity-rich Bratislava after his studies in Budapest.

Walking around the Austro-Hungarian spas, one could come across more political and architectural signs of the new times. Between 1929 and 1931, a functional water-cure machine was built in Trenčianske Teplice next to the Turkish bath – a new building for an indoor swimming pool, designed without any regional or national references as a simple, cubic structure with brick-lined facades, varied by extensive horizontal glazing with lattice-shaped divisions. Its author was Artúr Szalatnai-Slatinský, a Slovak Jew educated in Budapest, who, like Belluš, moved to Bratislava after World War I, where he carried out his most important project, the extension of the local synagogue complex.

Trenčianske Teplice also saw the construction of a mass-leisure machine – a modern outdoor swimming pool with the fancy name Zelená žaba (green frog), designed in 1934 by Bohuslav Fuchs. The building is notable for its soft composition incorporated into the landscape – the architect inserted three storeys of changing rooms and restaurants and a large outdoor swimming pool into a high rocky slope – and belongs to the major achievements of interwar Czech Modernism.

Its creator represented the most radical version of this trend; similar in style were the designs of Jaromír Krejcar, who built the Machnáč Spa in Trenčianske Teplice in 1932 – this time not a machine, but an entire plant of health and well-being. Its purpose was to cure with fresh air and sunshine, a remedy for tuberculosis. In addition, the place offered proximity to nature – a cure for melancholy, as depression was termed at the time. The building was equipped with spacious terraces with lounging areas, and the residential wing featured small, heavily glazed rooms with their own balconies. Machnáč looked like an extended dormitory for Bauhaus students in Dessau, a Gropius design from 1926.

Trenčianske Teplice was transformed in a few years from a paradise for the elite, steeped in the aesthetics of Arabian Nights, into a rational factory of health and contact with nature. Czechoslovakia also cultivated its modern image in the foothills of the Tatra Mountains; in the 1930s, a whole series of impressive investments were made there in very difficult topographic and climatic conditions. The first hotels and guest houses on the southern side of the Carpathian Mountains had already been built before World War I – in Poprad and Starý Smokovec, among other places – but there was no equivalent of our Zakopane there to attract the Slovak cultural elite. The Poles had been carrying out intensive modernisation on their side of the mountains since the early 1920s, symbolised by the Kasprowy Wierch (1936) and Gubałówka (1938) cableways completed just before World War II broke out. Czechoslovakia, with its not particularly friendly attitude towards its northern neighbour, wanted not only to show who could build better and grander, but also to emphasise the role of the mountains in the cultural and social bloodstream of the country. At the end of 1937, the main section of the cableway in Tatranská Lomnica, almost on a par with the one to Kasprowy Wierch, was put into service, and three years later another section leading to the top of Lomnica was completed. This investment was intended as a testimony to Czechoslovakia being a modern country, capable of creating the most sophisticated constructions.

A number of impressive hotels had already been built there for people travelling to the Tatras. In 1933, the Fuchs (see above), together with Karl Ernstberger, founded the “Morava” Rehabilitation Centre in Tatranská Lomnica; the functionalist five-storey hotel offered a view of the mountain panorama from rooms equipped with large windows and balconies, and a three-storey complex of kitchens and restaurants was built nearby; both buildings were topped with terraces. It was a true display of architectural craftsmanship and a marvel of modern technology – a world-class achievement at the time.

The most spectacular construction of interwar Czechoslovakia in the Tatras was the tuberculosis sanatorium in Vyšné Hágy, west of Tatranská Lomnica. The work on this facility began in 1935, but the scale of the project, designed by Krejcar, meant that it was not completed until six years later. The result is an elongated structure with an outline reminiscent of an aeroplane; on the south side, there is an eight-storey, almost 250-metre-long, symmetrical block housing the restaurant, guest rooms, and lounging galleries. To the north, a hospital building is added at right angles to the structure, which is complemented by several smaller buildings. All of them are characterised by uniform light-coloured facades, banded window layouts and flat roofs, forming a coherent modernist complex.

This time, humans aided by the modern state overcame not only disease, but also nature, first to heal the trauma of war and then to accomplish the impossible. The most important chords of this triumph rang out just before the Munich catastrophe – the surrender of the Sudetenland to Hitler in 1938 – and the outbreak of war a year later. At the time of their inception, all these investments aroused enormous interest and fuelled national pride, while also being part of a social transformation of unprecedented scope. Almost overnight, the mountains ceased to be pristine and inaccessible – tourism was taking over.

Continuing north, let’s cross the Tatra Mountains and head to Zakopane for a while. Post World War II now, at the end of the 1950s, in “Fame and Glory”, a forgotten powerful work by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, the writer’s alter ego, Prince Janusz Myszyński, bitterly recalls the image of a town which, in his memory, had turned from an arcadia into a factory of mountain entertainment. Could it have been otherwise? Clashing with massification head on, romantic fantasy loses its splendour. Finally, let us give the floor to the author of “The Maids of Wilko”:

“Of course, everything was different in Zakopane and in the mountains, because a lot of time had passed since that memorable trip in 1920, and the people were different, and the attitude to the mountains was quite different, and above all Janusz himself was different and reacted differently to everything. He could not help feeling sad when he saw the crowds at Krupówki or when he had to squabble in the queue for tickets to Kasprowy. Yes, because now they were supposed to be taken to Kasprowy by cableway and set off from there. But where could they “set off” to, when Malski’s little feet were clad in nice yellow shoes which would soon break apart before their group descended from Liliowe Pass to the mountain shelter? The Liliowe Pass now took on a completely different aspect for Janusz when you reached it “from above”; when you reached it from below on a dull yet beautiful walk, there was the prospect of seeing the formerly most beautiful view – the pensive and lonely Wierchcicha Valley.”[3]

Translated from the Polish by Tomasz Bieroń

[1] Stefan Zweig, „Chess Story”, translated by Joel Rotenberg, New York Review of Books, New York 2005, p. 43.

[2] Adolf Loos, „Ornament i zbrodnia. Eseje wybrane”, translated by Agnieszka Stępnikowska-Berns, Tarnów, Warszawa 2013.

[3] Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, „Sława i chwała”, MUZA SA: Warszawa 1997, pp. 510–511.