Our Story: Sacramento Cookie Factory
Spare me. You didn’t really ‘climb every mountain,’ did you?
Well. we pretty much said, “So long, fair well, aufwiedersehen,” and ciao! Only you spell ciao “eao” in Czech.
For centuries before it was left to slumber behind Czechoslovakia’s Iron Curtain, Karlovy Vary — Karlsbad in German — was a legendary European spa, its therapeutic mineral springs attracting the fashionable and the fawning, the earliest It Girls and the truly ailing. Peter the Great visited twice, and Emperor Franz Josef found time for a repeat trip, too. Beethoven, Liszt and Chopin took the waters and called at the right cafes, as did Goethe, Turgenev and Tolstoy. Even Marx submitted to some pampering, though he probably didn’t call it that since he was in the midst of drafting ”Das Kapital.”
Lore has it that Karlovy Vary got its start in the mid-14th century, when Charles IV was both king of Bohemia and Roman emperor. A group of his attendants, chasing a stag through the woods, were suddenly summoned by the howls of a hunting dog. They discovered the hound paddling in a pool of steaming water and, after fishing it out, founded Karlovy Vary — literally Charles’s Spring.
Baths in the waters from the town’s 14 springs were first prescribed to treat a host of disorders. Those early soaks, hours long, were nicknamed ”skin eaters” and could sometimes be worse than the ailments, leaving the skin chapped, raw and oozing. Some patients prepared their wills before arriving. Later, the drinking cure was added, at one point requiring as many as 50 cups of water a day. Between treatments, there were concerts and dances, visits over coffee and cake, and terrain therapy — strolls through the steep, pine-crested woods that rim the town, the hills traversed with scenic lookout points, shady wooden summerhouses and, of course, pubs and cafes.
The above brief of the Knedlik family’s escape from communism is retold by Allen Chamberlin, Mr. Knedlik’s “Creative Assistant”. If you wish to reproduce any portion of this site’s texts, please consult the author first. (He is relatively easy to persuade if he knows you give him due credit.) All copywrite claims apply to this and all other webpage texts at this site.