In fact, I just wanted to visit the Celje Castle, the country’s largest medieval castle home of the influential Counts of Celje of which Barbara of Celje was the famous queen of amongst others Hungary. But as usual we took the time to explore the environment and the city center.
And so I spotted, a bit unexpected, the bust of Alfred Nobel at Gosposka ulica 3. Interesting… what was this world famous Swede doing on the façade of the Quarter House (Kvartirna hiša)? A few clicks later we discovered an intriguing story which turned out to be as explosive as the dynamite he invented. The castle will have to wait … 😊.
So, here’s the story of Alfred Nobel and his obsession for a 17- year younger Slovenian girl, which took – big time – advantage of him being madly in love with her.
Fatal attraction.
Nobel met Sofija Hess in 1876 in Baden, close to Vienna, to where she “escaped from her boring life” in the Quarter House in Celje. It took him only a few days to digest the loss of his previous love who rejected his proposal for marriage. Sofija completely dazzled him. She was 25 years old, still a large difference with the already 43 years old Nobel who at that moment had made huge fortune with his most famous invention; reliable and stable dynamite.
Sofija was soon aware of his wealth and quickly began to exploit his fascination for her. Nobel rented or bought apartments to keep her close to him and paid for her luxury lifestyle. Her young age was already controversial, but especially her lack of education, made Nobel decide that he’d rather avoid to appear in public with her.
As time passed by, the relationship cooled off because Sofija kept squeezing him for more money and she was not exactly very loyal to him. Conversations, mostly letters, between them became sour. Nobel blamed her for her frivolity and especially lack of education. For Nobel who was an eminent scientist speaking six languages this was even a bigger issue than her constant love affairs.
A design error…
At this point the famous quote of Robin Williams: “See, the problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time.” proves to have some truth 😊. Nobel called her “his great devourer of banknotes” but he kept funding her, even when she got pregnant from Nikolaus Kapy, a Hungarian officer who was also a renowned mathematician. Gossip alert: some say that this is the reason that Nobel did not want to install a prize for mathematics. It is a salient story but probably the more practical reason was that there were already some famous prizes for mathematicians.
Their long-lasting and complicated relationship lasted for 18 years. According to recent research, Sofija must have spent between 350 and 600,000 euro a year on behalf of Nobel, a fortune at that time. Which brought him to the point that the relationship was unsustainable. In 1888 he wrote to “my dear child” (as he called her) that “I have no desire to fill the oceanlike vacuums with my savings”. But again, she convinced him to grant her a high monthly sum of 500 guilders, much below her expectation. When Nobel died a few years later, she threatened to publish 218 letters he wrote to her. To avoid a major scandal, she obtained 12.000 gold coins in exchange for the letters. But even this was not enough to sustain her big spending habits. She died poor in 1922.
At the end of the ride, Nobel’s letters were anyway published. In 2017 in a book under the title “A Nobel affair” , Erika Rummel draws a disconcerting picture of Nobel being a hypochondriac and pathetically jealous and condescending lover.
The Nobel peace prize.
Nobel never married. The woman he fell in love with before Sofija was his secretary, Bertha von Suttner. She worked shortly for him in Paris in 1876. But as she was already engaged, a long and lasting friendship was the best he could obtain from her. For years they were subsequently exchanging letters and it is said that Bertha, who was a peace activist, inspired him to include a Nobel prize for peace in his will. Remarkably, Bertha herself became the first woman to obtain the Nobel Peace prize in 1905.
In, 2013, this remarkable story of Alfred and Sofija was “carved in stone” in Celje. The small statue of Nobel in the city center reminds us that she did not even need a bar of dynamite to blow Nobel’s reputation to pieces.
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