Marianske Lazne Town Museum

Marienbad was one of Europe’s most celebrated spas in the decades before the First World War when Bohemia formed part of the Habsburg Empire. Amongst those who stayed there were Friedric Chopin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxim Gorky, Henrik Ibsen, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling and King Edward VII of Great Britain, who made the Hotel Weimar a regular temporary residence between 1899 and 1909. The resort was founded in 1805 by Karel Kasper Reitenberger, abbot of the Premonstratensian monastery at Tepla, 18 km to the east and Jan Nehn, the monks’ doctor, and was officially declared a public spa in 1818. Marienbad was formally recognised as a municipality in 1865. By 1850 there were 90 hectares of parks and gardens, laid out by the landscape architect Vaclav Skalnik (1776-1861), and by 1911 an ocean liner company was able to advertise to its American clients that there were eleven first class hotels at the resort, as well as seven recommended cafes, a theatre opened in 1868, and an electric tramway running from the railway station along the main street of the linear town, that was replaced by trolley buses in 1952. There were places of worship for most denominations, including the Russian Orthodox Church of St Vladimir, and the Anglican Christ Church, designed by William Burges (1827-81) and built, in shiny red brick, in 1879. The Krizovy Pramen (Cross Spring), the original source of mineral water, is protected by a neo-classical colonnade, surmounted by a dome and a cross, a concrete structure of 1911-12 replacing the original brick and timber building of 1818. The Kolonada (colonnade), an amazing iron Baroque structure of 1889, was cast at the Blanke Ironworks. The town museum, established in 1887, has occupied since 1952 the former inn where Goethe stayed in the 1820s.