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Guardians of knowledge nearly lost

They work with their hands to keep a tradition alive: In a world of progress, a few people still rely on what they learned from their forefathers. Their craftsmanship is in demand – because no machine can ever replace them.

COPY/KILIAN KIRCHGESSNER
PHOTOS/NIKOLA TACEVSKI

What he looks at first every morning is the water, the endless expanse of the sea. Arne Larsen built his house high above the skerries on the northwest point of Norway – on the Lofoten Islands. Huge windows afford an outside view from every room, like a frame for a great painting: the surf, rolling gently or raging wildly, depending on the season – displayed here in a panoramic format. “In my profession,” says Arne Larsen, “you never know in the morning what the day will bring.” The 38-year-old Lofoten fisherman has a calm voice, which has turned a trifle rough over the years. He is a merchant on the Lofoten Islands, trading in fish. His work keeps him outside regardless of wind and weather. “Even as a boy I used to accompany my grandfather when he went sea fishing,” he says. It was his grandfather who established the family tradition. Today the grandson runs the third-generation business, which has grown over the years: Arne Larsen employs a small fishing fleet. But even the largest vessel measures a mere 22 meters. After all, nothing in this work has really changed since his grandfather’s time: Here on the Lofoten Islands, fishing has remained manual labor – a job so hard you can feel it to the bones and you need to put your heart and soul into it. Winter is the fishing season. The boats head out to sea early in the morning from the small landing pier in front of the wooden building where the company office is located. “Our people ride far out to sea for four or sometimes five hours,” says Larson. They only return at night, sometimes as late as three in the morning. “That’s the moment of truth: when the guys dock and open the hatches. It’s only then that I know whether we’ve had a good day or not.” Many more hours are then required to process the catch. The company’s specialty has been the same for three generations: the famous Lofoten stockfish – prepared by splitting the fish and hanging them out to dry in the fresh air for the entire spring. Arne Larsen’s lines would span two kilometers if they were tied end to end. He sells his stockfish mostly in the south, with customers around Venice and lately also in Croatia. Even now, after more than 12 years in the business, he still gets a craving for seafood on occasion. But there was a time when he wanted nothing to do with the sea and the fish. He spent several years living in big cities, in Norway and even in Italy. But then he grew nostalgic for his native village of Sørvågen. “The water is so wonderfully clear, and I never tire of admiring the landscape,” he says. “I’ve seen much of the world, but now I know this: I’m just a Lofoten fisherman.” During school vacations in Norway, Arne Larsen takes his eldest son out to sea. His son is nine years old, and he too is destined to grow up in the mysterious world hidden behind the gates of the boathouse.

The next generation also plays a very active role in Pavel Truhlár’s work. He lives in Prague, around 2,000 kilometers directly south of the Lofoten Islands. To visit him you have to climb the stairs five floors up to his apartment in the elegant district of Vinohrady. Up there under the roof is a realm of fantasy and art: Shelves reaching all the way to the ceiling are filled with marionettes suspended from their long strings. Wooden boxes are filled with handsewn doll clothes, tufts of hair, and delicate parts of puppets still needing to be painted. Mounted to the wall above his workbench is a marionette that’s especially important to Truhlár: “That’s the first marionette my daughter made,” he says. For Truhlár himself, the path to the puppets wasn’t as straightforward as it was for his three daughters. Shortly after the fall of Communism he found a job in one of Prague’s famous marionette theaters – selling marionettes to the tourists during intermissions. “I found that most of the puppets were assembled carelessly, and many of the parts were machine-made,” he recalls. This aroused his ambition: There should be a better way than that! He had always been good at handicrafts, so he decided to change jobs: The salesman turned into the artist, the employee became the boss of his own business. “In the early years I’d sit in my workshop in the evenings, and during the day I’d occupy my customary spot on the Old Town Square in front of the Astronomical Clock where tourists always pass by,” he says with a little smile. “I’d strap on a vendor’s tray, and that’s how I sold my marionettes.” At some point in time he leased his first store near the Charles Bridge, and a few years later he opened a second store. Today he carries several dozen different puppets in his regular product line. The top sellers are Kaspar and the Witch, but Truhlár even makes a scuba diver, complete with the oxygen bottle on his back. Each figure is unique: If you take a closer look, you’ll notice that one Kaspar is sticking out his tongue while another gives you a mischievous wink. Pavel Truhlár faces a real challenge when he receives special orders from marionette theaters around the world. They request characters such as Pinocchios, dragon-riding devils and Don Quixote on his horse. “Creating such a puppet takes weeks,” Truhlár explains. But these artistic marionettes are a challenge for the players as well: In the case of Don Quixote, for instance, every limb of both horse and rider and even the horse’s ears have to be separately moveable, requiring the player to manually control a multitude of strings simultaneously. “Being able to do that takes hours of practice in front of a mirror,” says Truhlár. He himself succumbed to the charm of the marionettes long ago, even in his spare time: After work he joins some friends to perform his own plays with his marionettes. Pavel Truhlár just returned from a world tour with his little theater, and even performed in China.

The scale on which Dr. Michael Huber works is a good deal larger than Truhlár’s puppets: His masterpiece spans exactly 3,312 meters and is the subject of breathless admiration among experts in his field. Huber, who himself has a doctorate in sports science, is in charge of the “Streif” – the ski run on the Hahnenkamm mountain in Kitzbühel, Austria. This is considered one of the most spectacular downhill courses in the entire history of winter sports. As soon as they leave the starting gate, this race turns into a hellish ride for the ski pros: The steepest section has a gradient of 85 percent, and the skiers accelerate as if in freefall to up to 140 kilometers per hour. They whizz through wooded sections with rapid changes in lighting. Sudden bumps get them airborne for 80 meters. Yet they must stay on the perfect line at all costs – mere centimeters off course would mean a head-on collision with the safety fence. “I’ve skied down it myself,” says Huber, who is 44 years old, with a brief grin. “But that was before the slope was fully groomed.” Huber heads the organizing committee and is therefore also in charge of the grooming team that prepares this downhill course in Kitzbühel for the skiers. When his people set to work they augment the snow cover as needed, and they squirt water into the deeper snow layers under the surface so that the moisture rises upward to create a hard and highly resistant surface. Creating the perfect ski slope is a science like no other. “We’ve got years of experience that gets passed on from the older to the younger generations,” says Huber. Skills of the trade, precise timing and inch-perfect work are prime requirements. His team can determine the precise altitude above sea level on each section of the course by using a new GPS system. “And if too much snow has fallen anywhere and the slope is 20 centimeters higher than it should be we’ll make sure to remove the excess,” says Huber. Precision is vital on the Hahnenkamm. A particular contribution is made by the drivers of the snow cats, who do their job even in inaccessible areas and thus provide the groundwork for deciding who wins and loses. If snow then falls on the resulting hard-packed surface, up to 200 people set about clearing it again and restoring it to its original state. Michael Huber’s own work in preparing for the few days of competition takes months. “It’s a wonderful feeling when the work is done and the races start,” he says. “But I really can’t breathe easy again until the last racer has crossed the finish line.” World-class skiers complete the 3.3-kilometer run in less than two minutes.

Speed is not important to Roberto Bionda. He lives in the northernmost tip of Piedmont, above the west bank of Lake Maggiore. If you want to visit him at his workplace in his little village of Bee, you have to leave the lakeshore route to wind your way ever higher up on a mountain road past breathtaking vistas and through the villages of Cresseglio and Arizzano. What has influenced the character of this area ever since antiquity is an elegant sort of stone known as Beola, either white or gray, which is quarried nearby. Here in Piedmont entire houses, chapels, wayside shrines, fountains and bridges are built of Beola. For Roberto Bionda this remarkable stone has become his life’s work. He is one of the few remaining craftsmen who tile entire roofs with Beola. “Virtually nobody still masters the ancient technique of our forefathers,” he says. Beola has become expensive as the present demand for the natural building material of this region has become global. And above all, the craft Roberto Bionda has chosen is very hard work: A single stone weighs up to 50 kilograms, and a Beola roof is eight times heavier than a modern tile roof. Bionda has to lug such loads up to the roof truss, where he installs the tiles on massive beams. Such Beola tiles are four centimeters thick and they are kept in place on the roof just by their own weight. “This work has remained exactly the same as it was 1,000 years ago,” says Bionda. He splits the enormous chunks of stone from the quarries with a hammer and chisel – pure manual labor. “Even as children we used to take my father’s tools and chisel toys out of the stone,” Bionda recalls. Today his craftsmanship is particularly in demand for the renovation of historic buildings. Beola stone remains intact for centuries and withstands Piedmont’s sunshine and autumnal storms for generations. Roberto Bionda devoted his entire passion to his own house: He chose the precious Beola stone not only for his roof, but also for the stairs, floors and even the balcony. And of course he shaped all the stones himself with a hammer and chisel, just the way they’ve been doing it in Piedmont since antiquity.

EFFICIENT FROM Å TO BEE

COPY/SUSANNE STEININGER

A strong wind drives dark clouds across the sky. It’s pouring with rain. A small fishing boat casts off into the bay, where the sea crashes into the rocks. It’s a typical late fall day in Å, a village of about 100 people on Norway’s Lofoten Islands. Yet one thing is different today. 20 cars are moving along the narrow coastal roads along the fjords: The starting signal has just been given for the Audi Efficiency Challenge A to B 2009. The object is to drive 4,182 kilometers across Europe in nine days. From Å to Bee. The participants on this tour from Norway to Italy include 120 international journalists and Audi customers from Germany.

The Audi brand’s goal is to prove the efficiency of its vehicles. The tour therefore includes not only those versions of a model line that are configured with especially low fuel consumption in mind, such as the A4 2.0 TDI e, but also the sportiest versions, such as the Audi S4. The objective is to finish each stage not as the fastest car but with the best fuel consumption (at a specified average speed). Ten different Audi models, each represented by two identical vehicles, were available to the drivers. Each driver’s objective was to beat the other, equivalent vehicle’s fuel consumption. So during each stage the teams of two vied for the best efficiency score.

On this journey they encountered very different roads: After the ride through the wild, romantic landscape of Norway, the road from Oslo to Copenhagen seemed like a return to civilization: four-lane expressways, legal speeds over 100 kilometers per hour, industrial areas left and right. The stages on the following days proceeded via Berlin and Prague into the Alps to Kitzbühel. On the last stage, nature once again finally displayed its full magnificence. The sun bathed the mountain peaks in its warm light. Autumnal colors lined the road. At last the Audi Efficiency Challenge A to B 2009 reached its destination: Bee on Lake Maggiore in Italy. Everyone in the village was out lining the road as the cars crossed the finish line.

What the tour proved on hilly country roads and rapid expressways, and in dense city traffic, was this: Efficiency is standard in every Audi product. Because the different models not only verified the standardized values claimed for each model’s fuel consumption – they actually consumed even less when driven specifically with fuel economy in mind. The most efficient vehicle overall was the Audi A3 1.6 TDI, which made its debut on this tour. This model achieved the lowest overall average fuel consumption of all with 3.3 liters of diesel fuel per 100 kilometers – substantially less than its rated consumption of 3.8 liters.