User:Farina Archive
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Farina Historical Archive - Farina-Haus - Obenmarspforten 21 - 50667 Köln/ Cologne Telephone 0221-399 8994 – Fax 0221-257 1709 – e-mail: info@Eau-de-Cologne.com www.Eau-de-Cologne.com
The Farina family owns the largest economic archive north of the Alps. It stretches over 300 meters in length and is 4 meters high. From 1709 up until today, every letter, note, document has been filed and kept. Not only did Farina write a letter to a customer but he also had someone to write it out again so that he could file and keep a copy in case anything was lost or misplaced. In this archive you will find approximately 400,000 letters and documents written by Farina and his colleagues. This scrupulous record keeping means that we can follow the history of Eau de Cologne most exactly. Napoleon for example used approximately a bottle a day (he is supposed to have had his boots specially made to hold a bottle of Eau de Cologne). Catherine of Russia, Goethe and Voltaire were regular customers of Farina. We know that Goethe kept cloths soaked in Eau de Cologne on his desk. His wife, Vulpius tried everything possible to get Eau de Cologne on a regular basis. In our archive we also have the names of all the customers who didn’t pay (in those days they distinguished between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ debtors). Today the valuable documents are part of the Rhine-Westphalia Trade Archives.
