What is made up of 1,600 small, hand-crocheted squares, 25,000m of wool and thousands of hours of work over many months?
Join visitors at a German museum to admire the world’s largest crocheted mammoth.
The Ruhr Museum’s prehistoric mammal is a towering 2.66m high, 4.2m long and 1.37m wide and has been officially recognised as a world record by the German Record Institute.
It was created stitch by stitch in an open knitting café at the museum in western Germany, where volunteers crocheted panels that were then sewn together to make the woolly mammoth’s skin.
Hundreds of people came together after the Ruhr Museum and local association Zeit fur Solidaritat (ZfS), or “time for solidarity”, joined in a spirit of community, meeting up and chatting over coffee and pastries.
The mammoth is nicknamed Ummut which means hope in Turkish, says Ilkiz Senturk, ZfS chair in comments to the German daily, Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.
ZfS, a non-profit aid group, began in 2023 after the Turkiye-Syria earthquake and has since focused on promoting solidarity, tolerance and social justice.
Local artist Stefan Demming created the frame beneath the mammoth’s skin.
The woolly beast met the public on May 17 at a summer festival in the Ruhr Museum’s exhibition depot in Essen.
It’s part of a larger show – Surviving The Ice Age – at the former coal-washing plant. Visitors can see more than 350 exhibits, animations of Ice Age landscapes and life-like animal sculptures through to January 2027.
You can see original finds such as the mammoth skull from Haltern, life-size animal reconstructions and rare evidence of Ice Age flora. All add up to tell a story of life and survival amid dramatic climate change that shows the close connections between nature, climate and humanity.
The Ruhr Museum is located in the Zollverein Unesco World Heritage Site, which was listed in 2001 as a representative example of 20th-century European heavy industry.
Highlights include an orange-glowing staircase, and the museum offers extensive collections that cover 300 million years of history.
Not a traditional industrial museum, visitors can see how a formerly agricultural region transformed into Europe’s largest industrial area, the local tourist board says.
If you are in what was once Germany’s coal-mining region, you will see how the area has become a diverse cultural landscape, with with 1,000 industrial monuments, 200 museums, 250 festivals, 120 theatres and three musical theatres.
See if you can time your visit to coincide with international events held here, such as the Ruhrtriennale arts and music festival in August and September.
No matter when you travel, you will spot plenty of evidence of the region’s industrial past, from blast furnaces, gasometers and winding towers that have been transformed into venues for theatre, music, painting, dance, performance and sport.
You can also check out the Duisburg-Nord Industrial Landscape Park or head along the Route of Industrial Heritage, a 400km circuit through the area that takes in 54 striking monuments to Germany’s industrial past and present. – dpa
