The Khachapuri of Karlovy Vary

In which I try, over mediocre cheese bread, to make sense of history

By the time I got to Karlovy Vary, I had been in the Czech Republic for several days, and though I am generally one for sticking to the local cuisine, I really couldn’t face another plate of roast pork and the weird, mosaic-y dumplings called Karlovy knedliky that are made of old bread cubes and egg whites. The idea of eating what was most likely mediocre pizza in one of the ubiquitous ‘Italian’ places that pop up like fungi wherever there are tourists was not very appealing either. So when I came across handbills outside the Thermal Hotel advertising a Georgian restaurant, I jumped at the chance.

It took a bit of effort to find the restaurant. I rely so heavily on my phone in daily life that even now, when I’m purposefully trying to go without it, I still forget at times that I can just ask someone. This was one of those times, and so I stood there for quite a while, poring over my paper map, and scanning for the miniscule letters that read Kolma Street. Finally, I found it, and navigated my way behind a baroque church and up a steep, narrow road until I arrived, panting, at the restaurant.

Pushing open the door, I found myself in what felt like the foyer of someone’s home–someone’s gaudy, over-tchotchked home to be sure, but a home nonetheless. The feeling was heightened when a frazzled woman emerged and began interrogating me in a language I didn’t understand but whose motivation seemed clearly to determine what the hell I was doing there. You would think that a restaurant that plastered posters all over town would be accustomed to strangers showing up looking for something to eat, but this did not immediately seem to be the case. 

Still, I could see what looked to be a dining room behind her, done up in a riot of decorative elements–luridly floral tablecloths, candleholders filled with multicolored glass bits, red ceramic egg-shaped salt shakers painted with the Georgian flag–that looked like they had been carefully sourced from a Tbilisi flea market. There were four tables, one of which was occupied by two men in black suits gradually making their way through a dozen or so dishes. There were diners at the other too as well, but the six-top was empty, so when the woman finally gestured in a way that suggested I should wait outside, I assumed she was going to break it down to a more suitable size. Either that, or she was telling me to get out of her living room.

I hedged my bets, and headed back onto the street to wait. Within minutes, the two men in suits came out, and got into the black Mercedes parked in front. They had clearly been kicked out to make room for me, but didn’t seem to mind. ‘Khachapuri,’ one said, and gave me a thumbs up. 

I took his advice. The khachapuri was fine, though to be fair, it is hard to mess up cheese bread. The chicken in walnut sauce was vile, the meat so overcooked as to be literally inedible. Even the vaunted Georgian wine was, how shall I put it, not good. 

With not a lot else to distract me as I tried to get through enough of the meal to be able to leave without any undue awkwardness, I turned my attention instead to the other guests, and noticed  that the people at the other two tables were speaking Russian. When the frazzled Georgian woman came to serve them, she switched easily to their language, and at one point, even sat with one pair and chatted gaily.

By now, I took her linguistic facility as par for the course. The frilly-aproned waitress who brought me coffee that morning had switched seamlessly from English to Russian when she served the elegant lady and her dog seated next to me. At the Hotel Windsor, where I tried unsuccessfully to organize a peat bath for myself, the receptionist’s English was halting, but the Russian she deployed on a couple checking in sounded flawless. 

Still, watching the interaction at the restaurant made me wonder where all these Russians were coming from. There was a war going on, after all, and as part of the sanctions imposed on the Putin government, Russians were supposedly  banned from entering the Czech Republic. And as a people who had, within living memory, been themselves invaded by Russia, you’d think the Czechs would take that kind of thing pretty seriously. But Russians seemed to be everywhere in Karlovy Vary, including at this mediocre Georgian restaurant, and everyone seemed fine with it.

I needed help making sense of it, and so I turned once again to Blanka, that unending source of wisdom and knowledge, who also happened to be the receptionist at the Hotel Romance. 

Blanka told me that before Covid and the war, most of the real estate in town had been owned by Russians, and that the city’s centuries-old reputation as a kind of diplomatic safe-zone had made it the destination of choice for mobsters and oligarchs worried about poisoned vacation underwear or a sudden holiday defenestration. But with the invasion in February 2022,  the hotels all emptied of Russian guests, and only managed to stay open only because the government began using them to house Ukrainian refugees. Meanwhile, most of the Russians who owned property in town tried to offload it  before it was taken from them. Just up the hill,  the Hotel Savoy had been seized from its owner, who also moonlighted as a Russian arms dealer. But eventually, Blanka whispered conspiratorially, he got some kind of exemption, so the hotel was open again. 

It just didn’t have any guests, or at least not enough of them. It was the same for the boutiques, still chock full of brightly-colored handbags and gold-trimmed sneakers, but largely devoid of customers. There were ‘For Sale’ signs hanging from many lavish apartment buildings with Cyrillic lettering that had long ago faded. And, as I wrote last time, there was the spa culture, so long kept on artificial respiration by Russian tourists, that now seemed past the point of no return. 

(Something I learned later: The city wanted to staunch some of this flow early in the war with a Russian-targeted advertising campaign with the genius slogan ‘Karlovy Vary Understands You.’  When the campaign was leaked to–and widely lambasted in— the Czech press, the mayor insisted it was aimed solely at Russian speakers living in Europe.  ‘We are not targeting Russians in Russia to come to us,” she said. “That needs to be differentiated.’ Differentiated or no, the campaign was cancelled.) 

When I asked Blanka how she felt about all this, she turned hesitant for the first time in our conversations, and ultimately rebuffed the question with ‘I don’t know.’ I would encounter similarly evasive responses elsewhere. When I asked a woman working at the tourist office about how the war was affecting Karlovy Vary, she assumed I meant why were there still so many Russians there, and rushed  to tell me that they all lived in Germany with German passports, and therefore could enter the country legally. The receptionist at the Elizabeth Baths had told me he wasn’t sure the spa could survive if Russian tourism didn’t return, but  when I remarked that I had heard a lot of Russian spoken in town, he too got a bit defensive. “Was that Russian, or was it Ukrainian?” he asked. “I can’t tell the difference. Can you?”

It’s true, I couldn’t. But I also couldn’t tell how the Czechs—or the Georgians, for that matter— I met in Karlovy Vary really felt about the Russians who were there. Were they angry at them for evading the sanctions? Indifferent? Or just glad to have the business, however diminished? Was there some kind of lesson here about overcoming historical trauma? Or was this simply capitalism doing its inevitable thing? 

 On my last evening in Karlovy Vary, I walked up the hill to check out the arms-dealer -owned Savoy. From a distance, the hotel looked impressively, ornately Art Nouveau. But when I got up close, I could see that the main building was clearly a new construction, whose façade was made— and not very well— to look older than it was by about a century. The grounds were empty except for an Indian couple strolling with their daughter. I walked on a littler further, toward the golden onion domes of the neighboring Orthodox church. It was a grand space, but it was empty except for a lone woman. She was muttering words that may have been Russian or Ukrainian, but were, I’ m guessing, a prayer. 

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What I’m Reading

Most of my extracurricular reading this month has been about about the devouring Charybdis that is American politics, and I’m sure you can find enough of that on your own. Instead, I’ll leave you with a recommendation for this lovely piece by photographer Ben Buckland, who set out on a trek across Switzerland that was guided by similar impulses as guide this newsletter. Clearly, I need to start asking people to draw me maps.