From the sketchbook of a spa guest

The Kamnik Museum houses Ernst Mayer’s sketchbooks, which contain 40 watercolors depicting images of Kamnik in the 1880s.

Ernst Mayer was born in Himmelberg in what is now Austrian Carinthia on May 28, 1839, and died in Rijeka on February 14, 1926. He studied mathematics in Graz and Vienna. In 1861, he joined the Austrian Navy. In 1863 he was assigned as a temporary assistant to the Hydrographic Institute in Trieste, and in 1867 he was appointed assistant and from 1869 professor at the Military Naval Academy in Rijeka, where non-commissioned officers and officers of the Austro-Hungarian Navy were trained from 1866 to 1914. Ernst Mayer lectured at the academy on several subjects until his retirement (1901), such as descriptive and practical geometry and later hydrography and cartography. He was the inventor of several devices for hydrographic measurements, including an instrument for measuring currents with a magnetic needle. In addition to his professional field, in which he wrote several books, he devoted most of his free time to painting, especially watercolor and drawing techniques. It is in this field that he is associated with Kamnik.

He certainly came to Kamnik with his family for a summer vacation to the Prašnikar health resort. At that time, a typical bourgeois form of vacation was the so-called “summer freshness” or Sommerfrische, where guests spent their summers in the fresh air, mostly in the countryside with a simple, frugal lifestyle. In Kamnik, a spa and health resort were opened in 1876 by Alojz and Franc Prašnikar and Janez Kecel. The spa offered a wide range of services, such as numerous excursions to the surrounding area, a beautiful spa salon and a well-maintained park, villas, medical assistance and advice, opportunities for water treatment with electrotherapy and massage, a swimming pool with showers for swimmers and non-swimmers. The so-called Kneipp method of treatment was introduced in 1891. On average, 311 guests visited the spa annually between 1892 and 1900, which was a fifth of the guests in Bled at that time. While, for example, in Bled, guests stayed for a short time, in Kamnik they stayed for a longer period (one to two months or a whole season). According to the data, more than 50% of visitors to Kamnik were from other Austro-Hungarian lands, around 6% were foreigners (Germans, Americans) and 40% were from Carniola.

Holidays are said to be the opposite of a working environment, and this is how we can explain the visit of Professor Ernst Mayer, who exchanged the sea climate for a fresh mountain climate. As was the custom, he rented an apartment in one of the seaside villas near the Prašnikar Spa for a month or two and shortened his holidays with walks around the town and the surrounding area with a sketchbook under his arm. In this way, he preserved for us the images of Kamnik in the 1880s, that is, before the mass use of photography and the first postcards in the 1890s. He repeatedly depicted the ruins of the Old Castle, the Small Chapel and the town below it, Calvary, the bathing villas, the Zaprice Castle, the wooden bridge with the chapel of John of Nepomuk at the end of Velika ulica (today’s Maister Bridge) and other landmarks in the vicinity of Kamnik, for example Predaselj, the path towards the Podgorje and the like.

Sources:

Austrian biographical lexicon: https://biographien.ac.at/oebl/oebl_M/Mayer_Ernst_1839_1926.xml
Website https://moja-rijeka.eu/rijeka_biografije_mayer_ernst.html
https://tehnika.lzmk.hr/mornaricka-akademija-u-rijeci/

Zora Torkar