L’entreprise au quotidien IMPRESSION OF A BRIT All about garden gnomes… The advent of Christmas is an appropriate time to talk about garden gnomes, even if the connection with Father Christmas is a tenuous one. After all, they are both vigorous and active components of European folklore. S 40 go back to the Turkey of the first millennium, when there were reports of gnome-like creatures in the copper mines of Anatolia. hrouded in the mists of history, the origins of the European Garden Gnome (EGG) – like those of Saint Nicholas of Myra, a.k.a. Father Christmas – are rumoured to What came later was a spectacular odyssey and a proliferating garden gnome community. From the copper mines of Turkey, they emigrated to the salt mines of Poland. An intrepid American traveller, Bayard Taylor, visited the Wieliczka salt mine in 1850 and left an account of his visit. In it he talks of “vaults where a lot of gnomes, naked to the hips, were busy with pick, mallet, and wedge, blocking out and separating the solid pavement.” EGGs occasionally expose themselves (see ‘Flasher Gnome’, below), but they do not go ‘naked to the hips’ so this, in the days before Americans learned to practise political correctness, may have been a reference to the modest height of the Polish mineworkers. They would now be called ‘vertically challenged Poles’. Whether the story of garden gnomes migrating from Anatolia to Poland is true or not, I don’t know. They have certainly moved further westwards since. There is a thriving export trade from Poland, which has German garden gnome suppliers up in arms. But there does seem to be a historical connection with mining (remember the gemstone mines in Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?). Until they burst onto the gardens and landscapes of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, gnomes definitely were an inner-earth species. According to strange sects like the Rosicrucians and the Caballists, these gnomes still live underground. But not in Baden-Württemberg! There at a private hotel in Freiburg, in the heart of the Black Forest, you will find the biggest assembly of EGGs I have ever witnessed. Due to overcrowding in the garden, a detachment of them has found its way into the breakfast room. Germany even has a garden gnome museum and shop, located at Rot am See, again in Baden-Württemberg. Proprietor Günter Griebel reports that his best-selling lines now include 'Flasher Gnome', 'Stabbed Gnome' and 'Sexy Susie'. These owe nothing to Polish entrepreneurialism, as they are all made in Germany. Though particularly favoured by Germans, the garden gnome has migrated to other European countries where it finds itself facing local competition from such things as miniature Atomia in Belgium, Eiffel Towers in France, and just simply rubbish in Britain. One English enthusiast is a lady who has a community of 7,500 gnomes in and around her home. If nothing else, this confirms the fact that the English are the most eccentric of all the Europeans… It seems, though, that the idea of garden gnomes inflames the imaginations of many of us. A French activist group has created a ‘liberation front’ for them, Le Front de Libération des Nains de Jardin: its members abduct them from people’s gardens, camouflage them with paint and set them free in nearby forests. In response to this, a Swiss professor has founded the International Association for the Protection of Garden Gnomes, lobbying for legislation to make ‘gnome theft’ a criminal offence. Western Europe has even seen litigation over dwarf-throwing, where contestants try to throw a small person as far as they can – generally indoors, most often in a tavern. Challenging a ban by his country’s Ministry of the Interior, a French dwarf appealed to the United Nations Human Rights Committee and lost his case. To get back to EGGs, the species found favour in Germany because people were fed up with garden cherubs. Chief perpetrator of the garden gnome cult there was Günter Griebel's great-grandfather. Sensing that cherubs had had their day, he started replicating figures of old men in miner's outfits that progressively mutated into EGGs. So there may be something in the 'mines in Anatolia' story after all… Poles, who seem to have been the first Europeans to welcome gnomes, do not particularly approve of them except as a source of foreign exchange. “Polish people do not buy garden gnomes,” say the proprietors of P W Westimex of Nowa Sol, the biggest Polish exporters of the species. “They prefer to spend their money on food.” Sensible people. Richard Hill N°10 - DÉCEMBRE 2014 - ENTREPRENDRE (R.A) Pagina 41
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