Letter from Karlovy Vary: Bending to refill her cup at the hot spring, gold teeth glinting through the steam as she grins, Maria Turchanova is no stranger to the pleasures of Karlovy Vary.
It is the Kazakh pensioner's 12th time taking the waters here, and she says it is history as much as a bad liver that keeps calling her back from Central Asia to this genteel Czech spa town.
"The water, the baths, the massages - they all make me feel wonderful," she says, smile flashing in the shadows of a sweeping colonnade that protects her from a November shower. "It's thousands of miles from Kazakhstan, but I feel at home here. This was a famous place in the Soviet days and everyone knew the great names that had come here, all the artists and statesmen. It was a European treasure that we Soviets could visit."
She opens her bag and puts away her spa cup - a porcelain vessel like a tiny teapot, used ubiquitously here to cool the steaming, mineral-rich spring water on its way to the mouth - and makes for a coffee- shop appointment with a companion.
She walks slowly through town, following the curve of the River Tepla, past glowing jewellery shops and windows full of local Bohemian glassware and expensive furs of indeterminate breed, and scatters the names of long-dead visitors.
From Tsar Peter the Great, Russia's greatest Westerniser, who came here for treatment in 1711 and 1712, through writers like Turgenev, Gogol and Tolstoy, to Soviet hero Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space - they all sipped from at least one of Karlovy Vary's 12 main, reputedly medicinal, springs.
Habsburg royalty also knew this place well, as did Chopin and Goethe, Freud and Marx, Beethoven and Kafka; J.S. Bach played here in the company of his patron, Prince Leopold, only to return home to find that his wife had died and been buried in his absence.
Karlovy Vary, or Carlsbad as the Germans call it, was perhaps unsurpassed as a place for Europe's nobility and intelligentsia to meet, mingle and let inevitable intrigue ensue, and lorgnettes must have glinted in the woods above town, as their owners peered down at the couples gliding arm-in-arm through its streets.
It was Charles IV, King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, who is said to have discovered the springs while out hunting in the 1370s; or rather one of his hounds, which tumbled into a steaming pool of water in pursuit of a stag.
Finding that the waters worked wonders on his gout, Charles granted many royal privileges to the nearest town and gave it the name that it bears today: Karlovy Vary, or Charles's Springs.
"The waters are wonderful, the air is clear and I feel better than I ever do in Moscow," says Tamara Vasileva, a Russian pensioner taking her daily constitutional between the pastel- coloured houses that line Karlovy Vary's esplanades.
"My blood pressure was up when I arrived but I'm feeling fine now," insists her companion, Lyudmilla, who is here for the first time. "I heard that there were plenty of Russians here but I can't believe how many - even the locals speak our language!"
Every sign offering expensive services - from laser treatment and colonic irrigation to luxury property - makes bold promises in Russian; in the plush cafés, where cigarettes and towering cream cakes kill the sulphurous aftertaste of the spring water, the talk is of the winter's first snowfall back in Moscow and St Petersburg.
As a place to invest or stash cash and indulge the national talent for hypochond- ria, this Russian-friendly spa town was hugely attractive for the newly moneyed post-Soviet businessman of the 1990s.
Locals laugh at the caricature - of muscle-bound gangsters daintily sipping spa water and dodging hitmen while their molls enjoy a quick surgical nip and tuck - but admit the scale of Russian influence since Communism collapsed here 15 years ago.
"We've seen a huge rise in Russians coming here, and lots of them now own their own property and businesses - particularly jewellery, glassware and clothing shops," says Ms Petra Mrzenova, marketing manager of the Grand Hotel Pupp.
Founded in 1701, it claims to be the oldest hotel in Central Europe and Karlovy Vary's finest, and still welcomes eminent guests for the town's film festival each July.
"Many rich Russians stay with us, especially from Moscow and St Petersburg," she says. "They fly here direct from Russia and, for them, it really doesn't matter how much they spend. They want the most luxurious service. They really are very rich."
Mrs Vasileva though, who is staying elsewhere, wants something different from her three-week sojourn in Bohemia.
"To drink the waters and breathe in the history of the place," she says. "That's enough to keep me going for another year."