First we have to say something about the first name Urs.

Perhaps not by chance, it forms the first letters of the word “Urschweizer”.

And in a satirical book by the writer Alex Capus with the title “My Neighbor Urs”, the first sentence is: “I have five neighbors whose first name is Urs.” That probably means something.

Jan Wiele

Editor in the features section.

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But this is not supposed to be about Urs, but Ursli. So about the original Swiss in miniature. The miniature itself again seems very Swiss - that's not just a cliché. Ursli is thus perhaps the epitome of the original Swiss. Anyone who has doubts about this must confront anyone from Switzerland with the name. She will almost certainly call out the title of a children's book: “Ah, Schellen-Ursli!” There is an aid for non-Swiss people. Another newspaper article once described Schellen-Ursli as “the Engadin answer to Heidi”.

However, contrary to what you might think, Ursli is not that, but Ursli. Ursli was spared the negligence, which is now controversial with Heidi. “This is Ursli, look at him, a mountain boy like a little man! The pointed cap is straight up like a mountain peak, ”says the book that made him famous. And then there is also a book about Ursli's sister, “Flurina und das Wildvöglein”, as well as one in which they both have an avalanche adventure together: “The big snow”.

The three books, which together span the spring, summer and long winter in a mountain village and are also referred to as the “Engadine Trilogy”, conjure up a world in the face of which some may have asked themselves: Does it really exist anywhere?

We want to find out.

So we leave Zurich and Chur on the left, ignoring all the signs to the Heidiland amusement park that line the road here, and drive over the Flüelapass to Guarda.

Take a close look at the house

It is a village of particular beauty, especially when it is in the late light, almost 1,700 meters high above the Inn Valley between Piz Buin and Piz Nuna. And it's almost crazy what you think you recognize at first glance when you have the book of Schellen-Ursli in front of your eyes with the illustrations by Alois Carigiet: the facades, the thick walls, the wooden doors, the stone floor. The very first pages show the village and the house of Ursli's parents, explained in a rhyme: "Take a closer look at the house: it's old and there are pictures on it."

We are now sitting in front of such an Engadine house with Maria Louise Meier, who knows everything about the village, on one of his typical wooden sun beds. First of all, it tells us something about the nature of these houses, which are decorated with ornamental sgraffiti, an art of scratching in lime that has also been exported to the Engadin since the Renaissance. It highlights sayings that are written on the house, here mostly in the Rhaeto-Romanic dialect. In addition, there are often depictions of animals and mythical creatures that are intended to exhort to virtue or to avert evil. The building in front of which we are sitting is called the “Schellenurslihaus” on the map. But is it that simple with the relationship between fiction and reality? Not quite, explains Maria Meier. Alois Carigiet painted an ideal house for himself, so to speak, took the door from one of them,from the other the facade, from the third a bay window which he particularly liked.