The legend of Zerno or Jhernoz

As a follow-up to yesterday’s blog, I will serve you today with the legend of one of my home valley early dweller, called the Zerno or Jhernoz, but to make it easy on all of us we’ll call him Zerno. 

This man predates the establishment of the catholic religion in the Morzine’s remote Alpine valley, and the first monks that established the Aulph Abbey, 5 miles down river from Morzine. The Abbey was founded at the end of the 11th century by monks from Molesme Abbey in Burgundy, including the eventual second abbot of Aulph, Guarinus of Sitten, who later became Saint Guarinus. 

The name of the Abbey can be traced to the Latin word alpibus which means "mountain pastures" which later gave its name to the village of St Jean d'Aulps. Upon arrival, the Abbot looked for the eventual natives, and found three groups of folks that qualified as such. 

One of them, the Zerno, lived on the way to Avoriaz the modern ski resort, the second, that went by the name of Grou Braichard dwelled in the Manche valley, and the third, three women called the Dreffena, resided around what is now the Nyon ski area. 

Upon getting installed, the abbot sent for all of them as he wanted to firmly get them under his control. While the other complied pretty quickly, the Zerno wasn’t excited to meet the abbot and refused to show up.

At long last, and under the abbot’s constant harassment and reminders, and also perhaps out of natural curiosity, he finally came down to the Abbey, and there, in a display of rehearsed showmanship, the Zerno dropped his coat of wolf-skin over a ray of sun entering the room. There, to everyone surprise, including the abbot’s, the animal skin remain suspended around the sunbeam. 

Obviously, the Zarno knew a few things about domesticating photons! Most could have thought he was some kind of a witch, but I think that he had a chance to jump inside a time-travel machine and got to M.I.T. in 2065 to study the transformation of photons into solid lighting devices!

Then he began to walk, taking three steps forward and three steps back. Faced with this rather unconventional turn of events and Zerno’s unique behavior, the abbot thought that the man was no pushover, so he lets him go in peace. My take on that story is that the Zerno was both a maverick and a skeptic, filled with a healthy dose of common sense. 

By suspending his coat over the sun's rays he meant that our star was shining equally for all and that the new masters of the valley, the monks, had no right to chase or control those already there. 

The three steps forward and backward could have shown that the Zerno wasn’t a big shot, that he wasn’t intent on challenging the abbot’s authority, but that he didn't need Christianity, as he was perfectly able to cope with fears from his environment and his human condition, and wanted instead to live freely, day by day, as he pleased, going with the flow of prosperity and adversity, and that in the end, he was neither gaining or losing ground. 

You could call that an independent mind, and iconoclast and a free-thinker before his time. 

I liked that fellow a lot. Today, Jean-Christophe Richard, a local artist who has also fallen under the Zerno’s spell, wants to honor the man by erecting a large size statue of his likeness, some 11.5 ft tall, around Avoriaz ski resort, the place that allegedly was Zerno’s home.

He's looking to raise some 40,000 euros to complete his project. If someone is so inclined to fund the entire work, shoot Jean-Christophe an email from his site !