Each story is rooted in real local history and landmarks
In 3370 BC, a child living in a pile dwelling on Lake Constance wakes to the smell of smoke. The entire village of wooden houses is catching fire, and they have only minutes to rescue their family's most treasured seed basket -- the key to next year's harvest. Racing across swaying boardwalks above the dark water, the child must choose what to save and what to leave behind, in a story about loss, survival, and the seeds of a new beginning.
A Roman child living in the lakeside fort of Arbor Felix has befriended a great old tree that the soldiers say brings good fortune to whoever shelters beneath it. When Emperor Gratian arrives in 378 AD with his retinue, rushing eastward toward war, the soldiers plan to fell the tree for firewood. The child must prove the tree's worth to the Emperor himself -- and in doing so, learns why the Romans called this place the 'happy tree.'
A sick Irish monk named Gallus is nursed back to health in the Roman town of Arbon in 612 AD. Wandering alone into the vast forest, he builds a small fire -- and is confronted by a great bear charging from the darkness. But instead of fleeing, Gallus speaks to the bear with such calm conviction that the creature stops, retreats into the trees, and returns carrying firewood. A story of faith, wilderness, and an unlikely friendship that would give birth to a great abbey.
In 1515, a child watches as Bishop Hugo's workers tear down crumbling walls to rebuild Arbon Castle. With every stone they remove, the child discovers a different layer of the town's past: a Roman coin behind the mortar, a Neolithic flint tool in the foundation, an early Christian cross scratched into a pillar. Each discovery tells a story, and the child realizes that Arbon's castle is not just a building -- it is 5,500 years of human history stacked stone upon stone.
In 1903, a child whose family works in the Saurer embroidery machine factory watches in wonder as a strange, noisy machine rolls out of the workshop on the Arbon lakefront -- the very first five-ton Saurer truck, belching smoke and rattling cobblestones. Following the truck on its maiden journey through town, the child glimpses the future: a world where these iron beasts will replace horse-drawn carts and put tiny Arbon on the map of industrial history.
At midnight, the bronze fisherwoman on the Fischmarktplatz fountain steps off her pedestal, wrings the water from her skirt, and beckons to a sleepless child. Together they stroll through Arbon's moonlit old town, and at each stop -- the Roman watchtower, the Galluskapelle, the medieval walls hidden inside houses -- the fisherwoman reveals a story that the stones remember but the living have forgotten. By dawn, the child sees Arbon with new eyes: a town where every wall has a secret.
A child from a Thurgau apple orchard chases a runaway apple that rolls downhill, across a meadow, through the old town of Arbon, and straight into Lake Constance. Following the apple's improbable journey, the child discovers the MoMoe museum, meets five generations of the Moehl family in the apple-scented halls, and learns how one small fruit built an entire canton's identity -- earning Thurgau the nickname 'Mostindien,' the Apple Juice India of Switzerland.
A child joins the Roman barcarii -- the lake patrol of Arbor Felix -- aboard a flat-bottomed patrol boat on Lake Constance in the 4th century AD. Sailing past the ghostly remains of ancient pile dwellings poking above the waterline, and watching for signal fires from the watchtower on the peninsula, the young recruit discovers that guarding a lake is as important as guarding a border -- and that the stories of the people who lived on its shores stretch back thousands of years before Rome.
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