Once upon a time, in a pretty village in the heart of the Bohemian Forest, there lived a young farmer called Hansl.




Hansl’s great iron bathtub with its splendid green gold spout shaped like a dragon’s mouth out of which poured piping hot water.

Once upon a time, in a pretty village in the heart of the Bohemian Forest, there lived a young farmer called Hansl. Hansl had his own little fields and a wife to help him farm them.

But he was greedy. He wanted to work less and to eat more, and one day he had an idea of how: he would buy a green dragon (the vegetarian kind that eats rotten hay and old corn, not children) and would feed the dragon and his neighbours would give him money in return for all the piping hot water the dragon would make during the cold winter months.

So Hansl bought a small green dragon and called it Bio. He made a cage for Bio at the edge of the village and nearby a large pile of rotting grass and corn to feed it.

At first, all went well. Bio was pleased not to have find its own food. He would eat and sleep all day and in the evening around teatime he would breathe hot flames under great cauldrons of water. The villagers were pleased to have hot baths every night and to start with they didn‘t mind the horrid rotten smell of the dragon’s breath. And Hansl was pleased with all the money he got in return.

But the dragon was greedy, like its master, and as he grew bigger he demanded more and more rotten food in return for his flaming hot breath. By the second winter, Hansl had to borrow his neighbours’ fields to grow enough to keep Bio satisfied.

As Hansl’s purse grew fatter with all the money he was getting, so did Bio’s stomach. By the third winter, there was not enough land in the whole village to satisfy the dragon’s appetite, and by the fourth winter, Hansl had taken all the fields in all the villages around, both near and far, to grow enough corn to fill the dragon’s monstrous stomach.

Every village now looked the same. Dragon corn as far as the eye could see. Where once there had been fields of grass for horses and cows to graze on, and even fields of strawberries, now there was only dragon corn, row upon row. And where once the lanes had been quiet, now they were busy all day with Hansl's giant carts piled high with corn husks to be fed to the dragon.

By the fifth winter, Hansl was in despair. He was very rich by now but Bio, always hungry, grew crosser and crosser with each passing day. Some evenings, the dragon would go straight to sleep and refuse to breathe flames under the water cauldrons for the villagers’ baths.

And then, on one very cold evening, when everyone was hoping to have a really long, piping hot bath, Bio burst out of his cage in a mad starving rage. The dragon flew over the village in search of food, and when it could find none, it found Hansl’s house instead, by now the grandest house in the neighbourhood, and spewed rotten red hot breath at it until the building burst into flames.

By morning, the dragon had gone and all that was left of Hansl’s fine house was his great iron bathtub, with its four golden clawed feet and the splendid green gold spout, shaped like a dragon’s mouth, out of which had once poured all that piping hot water. It was the longest and hottest bath Hansl ever had.


Inspired by a biogas installation in the Bohemian Forest