37 Hotel De Saxe

The hotel on Masarykova Avenue bears the epithet “de Saxe”, meaning “of Saxony”. Its name thus recalls one of the stories connected with Teplice.

The hotel took the name de Saxe from the Saxon prince Joseph Xaver Karl Raphael Philipp Benno de Saxe. He was born in Dresden in 1767, a grandson of the Saxon Elector Frederick Augustus II. Joseph de Saxe, however, was not a direct heir to the Saxon throne; he served as a colonel in the guard of Catherine the Great. Soon, though, he fell into a dispute with Platon Alexandrovich Zubov, the Empress’s influential lover. Because of this, Joseph de Saxe was expelled from Russia, but that was not the end of his adventures. In June 1802 the Saxon nobleman was preparing to travel to Teplice. On the way, however, he meets Prince Shcherbatov, a friend of Platon Zubov. The idea of the two men staying in the same town is far too insulting, and so Shcherbatov challenges Joseph de Saxe to a duel. Duels were no longer allowed by then, so the two men had to withdraw to a lonely spot near Rýzmburk Castle above Osek. In the shooting, Shcherbatov aimed better and fatally wounded his rival. And so Joseph de Saxe tragically ended his life on 26th June 1802 in the arms of his friend, the Prince de Ligne.

In the former cemetery by St. Peter and Paul’s Church in Osek, there still stands an Empire-style tombstone in the shape of a pyramid. Its Latin inscription reads: “Here rests Joseph de Saxe, son of the most serene Xaver, royal prince of Poland and Lithuania, duke of Saxony, plenipotentiary governor of the king of both Sicilies, knight of the royal order of St. Januarius and St. Joseph of Jerusalem, who, having undertaken a journey to the springs of Teplice, died on 22nd June 1802”. “Le Chevalier de Saxe”, the Saxon knight, is thus one of the few members of his family who is not buried in the crypt of the Dresden Hofkirche, but near Teplice.

The original Neoclassical building of the Teplice hotel was not especially interesting architecturally. The exception is its reconstruction in two stages by the hotel’s owner Reinhold Blaschke senior, himself an architect: in 1912 he designed the wing facing Husitská Street, and in the 1920s his son of the same name added the main façade in the same style. The monogram RB also appears on the balcony railings; the second balcony bears WB, the initials of Wilhelmine Blaschke. The muscular atlantes carrying the cornice and the gable of the façade show that here the Blaschkes left one of the few examples of German modernism in Teplice.