Sweet little donkey ...
"A humourless town would be a heartless town. But Diekirch has both humour and wit.The authorities have installed a "Fontaine des ânes", as the donkey is the town mascot and it presides over the annual pageant. So what might once have been an insult is now almost to be gloried in. Why is this? One of the best things about the people is that they do not take themselves too seriously. They like to laugh at other people and they are willing to be laughed at. They even encourage it. (...)
Diekirch, the town of the donkey. This is said to have happened in two ways. Diekirch was the projected centre of the Luxembourg-Troisvierges railway, but the bourgeois of the period, avant-garde ecologists that they were, apparently objected because the smoke from the locomotives and the noise of the trains would have polluted the atmosphere and disturbed their peace and quit and, as the story goes, the authorities in the capital said that those donkeys in Diekirch did not recognize a sign of the times. This story may well be apocryphal, but the following one is more plausible. Once upon a time, the peasants of Diekirch were forced to use donkeys to till, sow and work the fields and vineyards on the slopes of the Herrenberg, as this was the only animal that could cope with the terrain. Donkeys no longer work on the Herrenberg, but the Diekirch donkey, thank goodness, is still braying today ... ."
in DIEKIRCH told by Ben Molitor
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