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

The sculptor Stephan Horota, born in 1932, created this artwork. His works, which primarily depict people and animals, are displayed in public spaces in numerous German cities. His preferred materials are copper and stone. After completing his schooling in Serbia, his family was interned in Kladno, Central Bohemia, following the end of World War II and forcibly resettled to Germany in 1947. Here, Stephan Horota trained as a carpenter until 1951. He then studied sculpture in Wismar, later at the School of Applied Arts in Heiligendamm, and from 1954 to 1956 at the Academy of Fine and Applied Arts in Berlin-Weißensee. Afterward, Stephan Horota initially worked in a wood sculpture workshop in Berlin and began working as a freelance artist in 1963. Other works of art by him in Schwerin include the “Rollerskate Kids” in Weststadt and the “Umbrella Kids” on the south shore of Pfaffenteich. Horota still lives in Berlin today.

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