SANATORIO DI BORNO [IT]

Exploration #252 Sanatorio di Borno. These buildings were constructed in the early 20th century, initially as a summer colony. With the outbreak of the First World War, like many other buildings in the valley, it was transformed into a recovery hospital for wounded soldiers.

After the war, the buildings were remodelled and renovated and in 1934 the Borno Sanatorium, named after ‘Gaetano Bonoris’, was inaugurated. The sanatorium was intended for the treatment of patients suffering from tuberculosis, dividing them into wards for men, women and children. With the discovery, spread and use of penicillin to treat tuberculosis, all sanatoriums were gradually decommissioned.

The Borno sanatorium was closed in the 1960s, and little by little the forest took over the surrounding area.

BATHHOUSE No.5 [GE]

Exploration #228 Bathhouse No.5. Bathhouse No.5 was one of the nine thermal baths located within the large central park of Tskaltubo (წყალტუბო), the town located in west-central Georgia designated as an important balneotherapy centre by the government of the former Soviet Union.

Tskaltubo has always been famous for its healing mineral waters and radon bath treatments. The centre focuses on balneotherapy for circulatory, nervous, musculoskeletal, gynaecological and skin diseases. The first balneological baths were opened around 1870 and in 1925, the first sanatoriums and curative structures were built. Development continued apace and in 1931 the town was designated a balneotherapy and spa centre by the Soviet government. Tskaltubo was one of Stalin’s favourite holiday resorts: he had a private swimming pool in Bathhouse No. 9, which is still in use today and not far from the abandoned Bathhouse No.5.

During the Second World War the hotels were used as hospitals, but after the war Tskaltubo became one of the most popular tourist destinations in the Soviet Union. Moreover, it was not only a luxury holiday for the rich, but spa treatments could also be prescribed by doctors and provided free of charge to the poorer population. Four trains arrived daily from Moscow. There were about 5,000 beds in 19 hotels and sanatoriums and up to 1,500 people a day underwent treatment.

The independence of Georgia in 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of December 1991 caused the Tskaltubo spa industry to collapse. Without guests, most hotels and resorts were forced to close. Buildings were abandoned and fell into disrepair.

In 1992, a war broke out in neighbouring Abkhazia. More than 200,000 displaced Georgians fled the conflict and about 10,000 of them found refuge in the empty buildings of Tskaltubo. It was supposed to be temporary accommodation but today, almost 30 years later, these makeshift flats have become permanent homes for new generations of families. The condition of the buildings is extremely poor even though they still possess the magnificence of Soviet architecture. A couple of former structures, Hotel Medea and Hotel Imereti, are still so incredibly photogenic that they host multiple wedding photo shoots during the summer months. Bathhouse No. 5, on the other hand, is just a skeleton of mouldy, peeling walls within the large city park.

In Tskaltubo there are other former thermal bath like the Bathhouse No.8.

LANDESANSTALT TEUPITZ [DE]

Exploration #198 Landesanstalt Teupitz. In the years between 1905 and 1908, the psychiatric hospital Landesanstalt Teupitz was built as a self-sufficient institution from 28 individual buildings with clear Art Nouveau influences.

During the First World War, it was used for the first time as a military hospital, then again as a so-called state insane asylum; at the beginning of the 1930s, 1,660 patients lived here. At the beginning of the 1940s, the clinic was subordinate to the Bernburg killing centre, where, according to the National Socialist eugenic-racial ideas, mentally and physically handicapped persons, mentally ill persons and persons classified as antisocial were exterminated within the framework of the euthanasia action “T4”, of whom more than 1,500 came from Teupitz.

Some buildings were reopened after the war as a psychiatric institution, but the majority were converted into a Soviet military hospital, which explains the Cyrillic lettering throughout. Since the withdrawal of the Russian forces after reunification and the rebuilding of the psychiatric hospital in 1997, the houses have been empty, the grounds are hardly affected by vandalism due to their remoteness, most of the damage is due to natural decay, and the former park has now turned into a dense forest area where roe deer and wild boar roam. From autumn 2021 the Landesanstalt Teupitz is totally fenced off with a 2.5m high fence and monitored by cameras.

SANATORIO CITTÀ DI MILANO [IT]

Exploration #109. At the beginning of the last century Italy, together with the other European nations, was fighting against the great health emergency of that time, “il mal sottile”, that is tuberculosis. The first structures in Italy were built in Valtellina; some of them are still present in the territory, some in a state of abandonment, others partially recovered in hospitals. With the increase of cases, mainly due to the fact that the poorest family members lived together in small houses, the government of that time decided to build new sanatoriums all over the peninsula. The task was entrusted to a young clinical tisiologist, Eugenio Morelli, who in a few years succeeded in training new specialised doctors and creating a network of sanatorium structures; structures distributed throughout the peninsula, designed in a similar way to contain costs.

The structure we are talking about in this article was inaugurated in 1924 with the aim of hospitalising the sick TBC patients of the Municipality of Milan. Built in elegant Art Nouveau style, it stood just a few kilometres from Milan, far from large population agglomerations, busy roads and establishments that could alter the purity of the air. The place chosen was also on the edge of a large wood and a pinewood that protected it from the winds. The climate was constantly less hot than in the city, better ventilated in summer and less foggy in autumn. Enlarged during the following years, in 1930 it could count on about 1000 beds. Like all sanatoriums there was also a church, which in this case was particularly important and was connected by corridors to the sanatorium so that the patients did not have to go outside.
Starting in the 1950s, following the contraction of the sanatorium sector due to the advent of the antibiotic era, beds were gradually converted to hospital requirements until the 1970s when the structure became a fully-fledged hospital. The hospital continued in its function for many more years until in the early 2000s when it was decided to build a new hospital, because it was more in line with modern hospital concepts. The decision to build a new structure instead of modernizing the old one sparked a lot of debate but in the end the new hospital was inaugurated in 2015, right next to the old one which was left from one day to the next in disuse, abandoned and unattended, at the total mercy of thieves and vandals.

The photos you can see in this gallery were taken in various visits not long after the closure of the hospital. Unfortunately, at present the structure has been depraved of everything that could be stolen, including the heavy cast iron radiators and the marbles of the stairs and the church; the pews of the church were set on fire, copper was stolen from the roof and finally bored kids meticulously broke every single window glass. A real pity for a historic structure that could have been recovered and used for new purposes.

ELISABETH SANATORIUM [DE]

Exploration #107. This sanatorium was constructed as a Lung Clinic between 1912 and 1914 by the Jewish Doctor Walter Freimuth and his wife. In 1952 the East German government repurposed it to treat patients with Skin and Thyroid tuberculosis. In 1967 it was again transformed into Skin Clinic. The main building was renovated in the 1980s, while the side buildings were designated as a housing unit for the staff and a “Wirtschaftshaus” – a stable of sorts to keep livestock.

The Clinic was closed down in 1994 and the property was returned to the Freimuth family who had survived the war in Exile in the United States. The building is currently in a very bad state. It was worth a visit due a very nice art work by Plotbot KEN, which unfortunately was vanishing too.

COLONIA LURASCHI [IT]

Exploration #101. The Mario Luraschi Institute (Colonia Luraschi ) was a mountain summer camp for children with respiratory problems. The building was built in the 1935 and in the 1937 it became property of the Fascist Mutuality.

On April 25, 1945 a garrison of Nazi soldiers and some soldiers of the Repubblica di Salò barricaded themselves inside the building, but the next day they surrendered without bloody events. After the war, in 1947 the institute passed into the hands of the I.N.A.M. (National Institute for Health Insurance), which in 1977 was replaced by the National Health Service.

In 1978 the summer camp was abandoned due to mass tourism to tourist destinations and the advent of drugs that made staying in a community unnecessary. The institute was finally abandoned in the summer of 1979 and was recently sold to a Swiss private citizen. I visited this location in 2014; although abandoned for more than 40 years, the structure was still in good condition, with a lot of furniture inside. Nowsdays all the forniture has been removed and the structure is very vandalized.

IL VILLAGGIO DI SONDALO [IT]

Exploration #64. In the first half of the 20th century, Italy, and many other countries, waged a real war against the worst disease of the time, tuberculosis, also called the ‘mal sottile’. Until the discovery of an effective drug in the second half of the 1950s, the only effective treatment was heliotherapy, practised in facilities called sanatoriums. Admission to sanatoria was also a form of isolation of the sick from the rest of the community, to prevent the risk of contagion. Sanatorium therapy was a palliative treatment to control symptoms and stimulate immune defences, through the triad “air – rest – food”. The locations for the construction of sanatoria had to be characterised by pure air, so many of these facilities were built along the Alps.

The sanatorium we are talking about in this article was the largest sanatorium in Europe. Built at the request of the fascist government, the choice fell on Sondalo because of its excellent weather conditions. In fact, not far from Sondalo had already been built a few years earlier, the Prasomaso Sanatoriums, now totally abandoned and in ruins. To built Sondalo, the work took eight years, from 1932 to 1940. The work was very demanding, both the access roads and the foundation plans were literally carved out of the rock, and artificial stone hairpin bends were built. The final result, however, was very neat, characterised by a rationalist style of architecture typical of the splendour of the regime of the time. It was a true independent village, equipped with an innovative system of cable cars that distributed clean linen, medicines and foodstuffs from the central building to the various pavilions. In 8 years, 9 pavilions were built to accommodate up to 300 patients each.

Although the village was only opened at the end of the Second World War, during the conflict the sixth and seventh pavilions were the protagonists of a little-known affair. In fact, thanks to a highly secret mission, very important works of art from Milanese museums and private collections were transported to the valley in lorries on duty at the Alpine dams and then hidden in various hollow spaces, including paintings by Rubens, Tintoretto and Segantini, in order to save them from possible bombing and looting. An even thicker mystery, never explained, remains as to how everything was done with the presence of a German garrison garrisoning in the village… unconfirmed rumours claim that the commander of the garrison was actually, in normal life before the war, a professor of Italian art history who had lived a lot in Italy studying mainly Tuscan art…
The Village has lost its importance since the 1970s and only a few pavilions are still in use as a hospital, which in recent times has become vitally important as it has become the valley’s reference Covid centre. The disused pavilions, on the other hand, are in a state of ‘controlled abandonment’. An association of volunteers, whom I thank for the opportunity to visit the site, is in fact responsible for preserving the abandoned pavilions from further acts of vandalism and has over the years collected many objects and testimonies of the sanatorium village in a small museum.