Since 1979, the artwork "Herr'n Pastor si'n Kau" has been located on the Schlachtermarkt, consisting of a brick-built fountain basin, a brick-built column with a surrounding bronze relief band, topped with an animal sculpture – a cow, also made of bronze. The relief depicts motifs from the eponymous Low German folk song "Van Herrn Pastor siene Kauh," whose oldest source dates back to the first century. Its origin stems from the literary episode "The Banquet of Trimalchio" from the satirical novel Satyricon, written by the Roman senator and writer Titus Petronius.
The Low German folk song is a cheerful to sad, mischievous, and mocking round song and tells of a deceased cow owned by a pastor. The individual parts of the animal are distributed to the residents of a village. The song is said to consist of more than a hundred verses.
The carillon of the Schwerin Town Hall plays the beginning of the melody of the folk song.
The artist Stephan Horota was born on 14 September 1932 in Futok, Serbia. He attended primary school in Novi Sad. After the Second World War ended, he and his family were resettled to Germany.
Here he completed a carpentry apprenticeship and then decided to study sculpture. To do so, he first stopped off in Wismar, then at the technical school for applied arts in Heiligendamm. But that was not all: finally, the comprehensive training also led Stephan Horota to Berlin-Weißensee to the College of Fine and Applied Arts. His motifs are predominantly animals and people. He created the "Children under the Umbrella" as early as 1967/1968 - these stand in Berlin on Prenzlauer Allee. The Schwerin sculpture "Umbrella Children" found its place five years later at the Pfaffenteich. Both sculptures look almost identical. There are only minimal differences, for example in the posture of the heads or the shape of the hairstyles.
