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Jonathan Bousfield on the Seedy Side of the Seaside

From strange tales of mysterious murders to suspected criminals hiding out to scams, duels and gambling, Opatija, a favourite seaside escape for Central Europeans at the turn of the last century, routinely filled Austrian headlines and the public's imagination in the early 20th century.

                        Opatija Noir

It wouldn’t be a seaside town if it didn’t have a dark side

 

The suspect claimed to be writing a guidebook to Italian hotels, an occupation that made him seem even more suspicious in the eyes of the press.

On November 7 1928 the Viennese daily Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung devoted its front cover to the case of Countess Feodora Sternowska, a Polish noblewomen who had reputedly died in mysterious circumstances in Opatija (or Abbazia as it was then known) earlier the same year. A single, wealthy, 34-year-old woman who was (according to the papers) surrounded by male suitors, Sternowska had died after inhaling the scent of a beautiful bunch of golden-yellow roses. The bouquet had been delivered by a young man she had met by chance while strolling on the seaside promenade. The man had charmed his way into her confidence by claiming to have been a wartime comrade of Sternowska’s fiancé, who had died on the Eastern Front during World War I. The pair had tea together; and the man had a bouquet of Maréchal Niel roses sent to the place where Sternowska was staying. When her maid went to check on her later that evening, she was dead. Several weeks later in Warsaw, the countess’s sister Leonie received a similar bouquet of roses from a similarly mysterious stranger. She didn’t particularly like roses, however, and passed them on to her maid instead. It was the maid who was found dead the next morning.

The story of the mystery man and his poison-bearing roses was carried by newspapers throughout Central Europe. It was covered by Paris crime magazine Le Detective, and even made it as far as the Brazilian illustrated weekly Revista da Semana. However none of these initial reports were ever followed up. Neither Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung nor any of the other papers ever got round to telling its readers whether the rose murderer got caught, or indeed whether a Countess Sternowska had ever actually existed. Like many news-wire reports, the case was eagerly seized upon by newspaper editors with pages to fill, then abruptly dropped due to the lack of any subsequent information. Countess Sternowska went viral and then disappeared, an early premonition of the world of hype, rumour, and fake news.