According to a Carinthian legend, an entire town lies beneath the waters of Wörthersee. Its bells can still be heard, and a small bronze figure in Klagenfurt remembers the man who sent it there.
On quiet evenings, those passing the Schwarze Wand by boat on Wörthersee were said to hear bells rising from beneath the water. The sound belonged to a town that had disappeared long ago, its houses, churches and inhabitants swallowed by the lake.
The real Wörthersee has a different origin. During the last Ice Age, the Draugletscher carved basins into the landscape of what is now the Klagenfurt Basin. As the ice retreated, water collected and remained behind.
But the legend offers another explanation. It begins not with glaciers, but with a feast, an ignored warning and a small gray man carrying a barrel.
The town beneath the water
In the version preserved in Franz Pehr's Kärntner Sagen, a prosperous town once stood where Wörthersee lies today.
Its inhabitants had grown wealthy, proud and indifferent to their obligations. On the evening before Easter, they gathered for a celebration, eating, drinking and dancing as the night grew late.
The church bells sounded, but nobody paid attention.
Then a small, ash-gray man entered the hall. He looked upon the festivities and warned the guests that the coming day was sacred. They should return home, he told them, while there was still time to repent.
The guests laughed and continued dancing.
Shortly before midnight, the little man returned. This time he carried a small barrel. He repeated his warning and threatened to open its tap if the celebrations continued.
Again, nobody listened.
At midnight, the lights went out. The walls trembled and a violent storm broke over the town. The little man disappeared, leaving his barrel behind with its tap open.
Water poured from it without end. It filled the hall, entered the houses and spread across the surrounding land. By morning, the town and its inhabitants had disappeared beneath the flood.
According to the legend, this was how Wörthersee came into being.
The story does not end with the destruction. Pehr's account describes buildings still standing beneath the water, their empty rooms inhabited by enormous fish and water serpents.
What remains above the surface is a lake. What the story places beneath it is an entire former world.
The bells are the most persistent part of that imagined settlement. Even after the town has disappeared, their sound is said to rise from the depths near the Schwarze Wand.
A legend in the written record
Klagenfurt's official folklore archive attributes the familiar sunken-town narrative to Franz Pehr's Kärntner Sagen, citing a 1913 edition.
The collection preserves a written version of the tradition, but does not establish exactly when the story originated or how it changed before reaching print.
There is, however, evidence of another Wörthersee bell story from an earlier period.
An 1891 volume of Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild, devoted to Carinthia and Carniola, briefly records a legend about a bell lying at the bottom of Wörthersee.
In that account, the bell leaps from its tower into the lake when the church organ is sold to Maria Saal.
There is no little gray man, no barrel and no flooded town.
It would be tempting to treat the two stories as versions of a single original legend. The available evidence does not establish that relationship. What it does show is that the idea of a bell resting beneath Wörthersee appeared in print before Pehr's collection.
The lake had acquired more than one story about what lay below its surface.
The little man in Klagenfurt
The Wörtherseemandl, as the figure is known, acquired a permanent public form in 1962.
That year, Klagenfurt sculptor Heinz Goll created a small bronze figure for a fountain in the city's pedestrian center. It stands today at Dr.-Arthur-Lemisch-Platz, not far from the streets and squares of the old town.
The little man raises one finger in warning. Beside him is the barrel, its tap open, with water flowing continuously into the fountain.
A marble tablet nearby recounts the legend.
Goll's sculpture brings the story from the lake into the city. The figure is neither an imposing monument nor a representation of the drowned town itself. It is the messenger, caught at the moment when a warning has become a threat.
What floods an entire valley in the legend becomes a modest stream of water in a pedestrian square.
The barrel remains open.