03. Swiss ballistics

There is, in Swiss history, a constant that no neutrality has managed to erase: a familiarity with stone as a projectile. Even before the militia army, the Alpine redoubt and the bunkers dug into the rock, the defence of the territory seems to have been entrusted to gravity.

Tradition has it that at Morgarten, in 1315, the Confederates welcomed the Habsburg knights by rolling boulders and tree trunks down the slope; that at Näfels, in 1388, the men of Glarus answered the assault with a hail of stones; that at Giornico, in 1478, the clash passed into memory as the battle of the “Sassi Grossi”, the big stones. In this story the mountain is not a backdrop: it is an arsenal. One fights with what the landscape provides, and the landscape, here, is made above all of stone.

With history pacified, the gesture survives as a sport. Steinstossen, stone throwing, has its relic in the Unspunnen stone: 83.5 kilograms of granite made famous by the Unspunnen festival, founded in Interlaken in 1805. But not even the relic escapes its ballistic destiny. In 1984 it was taken by Jura separatists; in 2001 it reappeared engraved with the European stars; in 2005 it vanished again, replaced by a paving stone bearing the Jura coat of arms. Since then contests have been held with a spare stone found on the Grimsel. Even the symbolic stone, in Switzerland, ends up being thrown elsewhere.

Cavenago’s erratics, from the jewel of Gioia erratica to the inhabitable boulders of Lugano and the Maloja, take part in the tradition in their own way: they are stones to be looked at, inhabited, at most worn. Throwing them remains, for now, a hypothesis.

Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago

A thrower hurls the Unspunnen stone, engraved with the date 1805, before the crowd at the 1955 festival

Unspunnenfest 1955: throwing the Unspunnen stone, which bears the date 1805.

Photo © Comet Photo AG (Zürich), ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons)

The Battle of Morgarten in a 15th-century miniature: boulders roll onto the Habsburg knights

The Battle of Morgarten (1315) in the chronicle of Diebold Schilling the Elder, 15th century

Diebold Schilling the Elder, public domain (Wikimedia Commons)

Village festival with stone throwing in front of wooden houses, aquatint from 1835

Ludwig Vogel and Franz Hegi, Steinstossen, aquatint, 1835. Swiss National Library, Gugelmann Collection

Public domain (Wikimedia Commons)

The Battle of Näfels in the Spiezer Chronik: large boulders on the slope above the fighting

The Battle of Näfels (1388) in the Spiezer Chronik by Diebold Schilling, 1484

Diebold Schilling, public domain (Wikimedia Commons)

The spare Unspunnen stone, a rounded granite block engraved with dates

The spare stone used today in the Unspunnen contests, in place of the original that vanished in 2005