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Reuters Festival a stone's throw from reality Fri Aug 26, 1:17 PM ET ZURICH (Reuters) - A medieval-style festival of stone-throwing, wrestling and yodeling has been canceled after floods swamped Switzerland and Swi ss-French separatists stole the iconic rock traditionally hurled by comp etitors.
Click Here The "Unspunnenfest," an extravaganza of Swiss folk culture which only tak es place roughly once a decade, had been pencilled in for the first week end of September in the village of Unspunnen in the Bernese Alps. But the floods and mudslides which have ravaged the area, sweeping away h ouses and cutting off towns, sounded the death knell on a contest alread y hampered by the theft of its symbolic centerpiece -- the "Unspunnenste in." The stone, an 80-kg emblem of Swiss nationality, was stolen from display in a hotel in the city of Interlaken last weekend. Swiss media said Fren ch-speaking separatists who wish to secede from the German-speaking cant on (state) of Berne claimed responsibility for the theft. Despite its diminutive size and multilingual population, Switzerland is s plit by a cultural gulf between the Germanic majority and French minorit y Berne police said the thieves had replaced the stone with a plaster repli ca bearing the emblem of French-speaking Jura, the canton to which the s eparatist group want to belong. "The stone has still not been found," Unspunnenfest spokesman Peter Wenge r said. The Unspunnenstein was previously stolen by separatists in 1984. A long wait may be in store for those keen to see the spectacle of burly Swiss men lining up to heave the Unspunnenstein above their heads, sprin t forwards and hurl it through the air in a centuries-old show of streng th. "Last time the stone disappeared we didn't find it for 16 years," Wenger said. The Unspunnenfest is nevertheless rescheduled for September 2006. Unspunnenfest organizers had been prepared to use a replica stone this ye ar, but the weather caused transport chaos across the country as well as the region, making it almost impossible for people to reach the village .
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