Fergus Butler-Gallie seeks bodily and monetary cleanliness.
It is 9:30am in Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic, and I have settled in for a good morning of watching elderly Slavs scald themselves. They approach the thermal springs for which the town has been famous since medieval times. The hottest one exits the ground at something approaching 80 degrees. The pensioners who flock to Karlovy Vary to ‘take the waters’ arrive each morning and fill up funny little porcelain drinking pots – half-beer stein, half-teapot – with water. These, the invention of a 19th-century quack called Jan Becher, are supposed to maximise the medicinal properties of the waters as well as cooling them to a drinkable temperature. Elderly ladies hobble along with these pots, before taking a tentative sip and then writhing around making noises like dying gremlins. They have discovered that the liquid has remained, despite Jan Becher’s magic, at a painful 70 degrees. It happens every day, without fail.
There are other springs that flow at more reasonable temperatures, but all have their own threats. One stream advertises its laxative properties when drunk at a particular temperature. It only says so, however, in Czech, leaving many visiting Russians and Germans hopping towards the town’s scantily available lavatory facilities. Another spring, in the ornate Park Colonnade, is said to be a cure for hepatitis, yet it is confusingly close to a different spring that is exceptionally high in carbon dioxide content. It tastes absolutely, irredeemably foul. I deliberately slow my walk to watch as one young man explains to his friend the health-giving properties of the water, before spitting it out with gusto, like he’s just eaten the contents of a three-day-old ashtray.
My people-watching lasts a good while before I saunter back to my room at the Grandhotel Pupp, stopping for one of their alcoholic coffees which contains, mysteriously, chunks of coconut. Later, I will sit in a very hot room with a German pensioner, a nervous couple of Czech newlyweds and a man whose terrifying silence telegraphs his Russianness more clearly than if he had opened his mouth. All of us will be completely naked. This is the spa world of Mitteleuropa. Wes Anderson meets Yuri Andropov.
It is the faintly unsettling atmosphere of decline that brings me back to Karlovy Vary every year. I love the Grandhotel Pupp, with its lift muzak of 00s pop hits played on a tinkling piano. I love the Hotel Imperial with its private funicular railway and mile-long corridors. The staff – almost all locals who are bemused as to why anyone would go there in the first place – tease me for my affection and my accent. ‘You speak like this,’ one of them says to me, before miming a flaccid arm, ‘like you have mrtvice’, which, flatteringly, is Czech for ‘a stroke’.
For all the idiosyncrasy of Karlovy Vary’s appeal, however, I am not alone on my visits. The region of which this crumbling fantasy town is the capital receives 1.3 million visitors a year. People come for various reasons and have done so for many years. Vast hotels, parks, promenades, spas, casinos, golf courses and a racing hippodrome are testament to what the resort was in its pre-World War One heyday. Now, depressed-looking tourists rattle around them, old pennies in an ornate biscuit tin.
What do they do once they’re in Karlovy Vary? They can’t all, like me, be there for the people watching, the art nouveau and the asbestos? Some do still troupe along the rows of mineral springs with their special drinking teapots, adamant that a 19th-century cure can solve 21st-century problems.
However, it is clear that many of the guests are in fact biding their time, kicking their heels among the genteel boredom of daytime in a decaying spa town and waiting for the evening to fall on the cupolas and colonnades. Karlovy Vary might not be able to clean up your liver, but it sure can launder your money.
The Russians have always had a soft spot for Karlovy Vary. It features in Anna Karenina and there is a longstanding Czech joke which has the ill-fated President Dubček inform Brezhnev in 1968 that if he insists on sending an invasion force to Prague, he will retaliate with a strike on Karlovy Vary. In the latter stages of the cold war, its proximity to the border with the west meant the resort crawled with the KGB. Those same agents came back, newly wealthy from the looting of Russian state assets in the 1990s, bringing a brashness to the faded halls and ballrooms.
However, since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the stream of Russians to this outpost of the west – now part, after all, of the EU – has become more noticeable precisely because they no longer wish to be noticed. In the Karlovy Vary of 2019, Russian tourists booked the priciest tables and ordered the best champagne. They were there to flaunt their wealth; to be seen and heard. Now – as the manoeuvring of assets to, and around, a west heavy with sanctions has become a priority for the Russian super-rich – they come to hide cash, not display it.
There are issues for these visitors, loopholes that were not there five or ten years ago. The Czech Republic under its newish liberal interventionist President, Petr Pavel, is distinctly hawkish on Russia and Russians. One Karlovy Vary insider tells me that many of them travel on Kazakh or other central Asian passports. Direct commercial flights between Moscow and the resort that used to run daily have been suspended due to EU regulations aimed at hitting the oligarchy where it hurts. Private flights from Karlovy Vary airport to Moscow are, however, still available at a cool €5,400 an hour.
What keeps bringing in the Russians in their droves is a remarkably simple proposition. Russian roubles are easily exchanged for the underregulated Czech crown. There are bureaux de change in virtually every other alleyway for the small-time cash converter, and almost all hotels offer desks and services for the larger sums.
The really big sums are changed using private arrangements with Czech businessmen, the notes ready to greet Russian holidaymakers when they arrive. At one, two or three in the morning, they go to the casinos, mostly in the Pupp and Thermal hotels. Here they play the table games. The most popular is Russian poker, the rules of which allow gamblers to occupy multiple positions and to place large insurance bets against the dealer, thus maximising the amount of money on the table at any one time.
The actual playing of these games is almost superfluous. I recall watching a man sit with his Kazakh passport visible next to his chips and spend several hours shovelling money in the dealer’s direction. Some will lose thousands of euros in one sitting. In my experience, the croupiers at the Pupp’s casino seem generally bemused by people who come and play to win money.
The purpose of these gamblers’ visits becomes clear as they return to the cash desk at the end of play: all chips are exchanged, not for the currency with which they were purchased, but for crisp, fresh euro notes. Pockets, or in some cases bags, filled with these sanction-free winnings, the Russians slink back into the nighttime, happy even if they have lost thousands at the table. I wouldn’t go as far as to say you can see their smiles glinting in the dark of the Karlovy Vary nighttime but, for a nation not known for its effusive displays of joy, they seem pretty cheery all things considered.
Such is the popularity of these nocturnal money runs that a whole shadow industry has grown up in Karlovy Vary’s otherwise placid confines. There is the Lady Marion burlesque club with a Fred Flintstone-themed sex room which was, the brochure proudly tells its customers in Czech, German and Russian, freshly redecorated for 1994. There is the Old Slavic Kitchen, a subterranean labyrinth where Russians can eat away from the prying eyes of the generally unfriendly Czechs and Germans. Bolt and Uber run with remarkable efficiency for a tiny spa town, servicing the returns to the airport or to Prague which continue through the night.
Whether there will be any attempt by the Czech government to crack down on this new industry remains to be seen. It seems unlikely, given Karlovy Vary’s dependence on tourism. The water is too warm and enticing to turn off the tap. I shall return this autumn, I hope, and take my same room with the faded wallpaper and view out over the town. I will watch them all again: the old Germans, the scalded old ladies, the bashful honeymooners. And among the colonnades, the oligarchs will continue to swim, sweat and saunter until the lucrative business of the night begins.
