In 1835, Ferdinand Gustav Kühne, a Saxon writer and teacher, estimated that the Germanic realm was inundated with spas and that nowhere else were there as many as in Central Europe. In France there were “only ten springs, in Italy eight, Hungary had twelve, Sweden three, Spain two, England two, in Denmark and in vast Russia there was only one mineral spring of note in each, whereas in German-speaking countries, that is, including Bohemia and Switzerland, 149 facilities claimed to possess healing springs.” Although Kühne's estimate of foreign spas was too low—according to recent studies, the number of spas in England and France was significantly higher—contemporary accounts and recent local studies support his finding that Germans had the most bathing facilities in Europe. Fred Kaspar has isolated ninety-nine spas and mineral springs in Westphalia alone. Beginning in the last third of the eighteenth century, the number of spas and spa goers in particular increased rapidly in the Germanic realm. Only 200 guests came to the Kissingen spa in the summer of 1800, whereas fifty years later there were close to 4,000 and by the turn of the century 15,000 guests proper and more than 20,000 day visitors. Pyrmont, one of the most popular spas in the eighteenth century, started with 1,424 guests proper (not including peasants who were not considered guests proper) reaching 2,800 guests by the middle of the century, and around 19,000 by 1900.
Returning Chernivtsi to the Cultural Map of Europe: The Meridian Czernowitz International Poetry Festival