Built in 1898 for the Russian aristocrats and wealthy Russians who came to take the waters at Karlovy Vary — at one point a substantial portion of the spa town's high-season visitors were Russian — the Church of Saints Peter and Paul rises above the western bank of the Teplá with three golden onion domes that feel startlingly out of place among the Central European Baroque and neo-Classical architecture surrounding it. The effect is entirely intentional and rather splendid.
The interior is decorated with frescoes and icons in the Orthodox tradition and is maintained as an active place of worship. The church is one of the few surviving physical traces of the Russian connection that shaped the town throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries — a connection that has had complicated echoes in more recent decades.