Davos, Jan 18 (PTI) Around 1880, English people suffering from the then-fatal and raging tuberculosis sought refuge in the mountain air of Davos in the hope of getting well and also built a church here.
That church is now the USA House for the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting week.
The historic church will host US President Donald Trump, his cabinet colleagues, businessmen, and others attending the five-day annual meeting of over 3,000 global leaders starting Monday.
By far, Trump is already being seen as the biggest star of this year’s congregation of rich and powerful from across the world in this Swiss ski resort town, which first rose on the global map as a health tourism destination due to the tuberculosis raging across Europe in the late 19th century.
The Englische Kirche church on the main promenade of this small town was apparently to be demolished in the late 1970s to make way for an apartment complex, but locals came together to stop that.
Now, it is listed as a historical monument and has been taken over by the Gemeindebund of the Free Evangelical Church of Switzerland.
Despite the WEF now being the biggest claim to fame of Davos on the global stage, it offers much more than that, especially for skiing enthusiasts.
It is also a home to the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, who moved here to help his ailing wife live longer.
Once famous for being a summer health resort, Davos has gradually emerged as a major winter sports hub in the Alps, but its biggest claim to fame for the past five decades has been the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting every January, beginning in 1971.
The Geneva-based WEF is hosting its 56th annual meeting here beginning Monday, where more than 3,000 leaders from across the world will participate in a high-profile talkfest for five days.
To cover this global elite jamboree, there are more than 500 journalists and thousands of support staff as well.
While such a high-profile event leads to all hotels and rental apartments being occupied, the die-hard winter sports fans still throng this place as the WEF week also means relatively smaller crowds in ski areas and on mountain cableways.
The only drawback for tourists is that they cannot stay within the town, which has less than 10 medium-sized hotels and about 40 small ones, including in nearby areas like Klosters and Dorf.
Besides, the so-called WAGs and HABs (wives and girlfriends/husbands and boyfriends), as referred to by locals and others privately, but as partners on record, of those attending the WEF meet are also around in large numbers on ski circuits and at various tourist destinations of the town that comprises two big parallel roads and numerous connecting alleys.
Davos’ history as a modern and popular holiday destination dates back 150 years, when the first winter guests arrived here in 1865. Till then, it was just a summer mountain health resort with a strong reputation for the treatment of tuberculosis patients.
One day in February 1865, Doctor Friedrich Unger and Hugo Richter from Germany arrived here and began a course of treatment on a bed made from a hay shed covered with boards.
The treatment proved successful, and both men were able to return to work. Soon after, Unger returned to Davos and worked as a doctor here for over 20 years.
Richter married a Davos girl and took over the management of a guest house. Later, he also moved his publishing business to this small town and began printing two local newspapers.
Another feather in its cap is that Davos is home to painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who spent his last 20 years in this town, which is full of many of his finest paintings.
Besides a museum devoted to Kirchner’s work, his paintings can be seen everywhere in Davos.
Towards the end of his life, Kirchner suffered a major nervous breakdown and spent his last days in a sanatorium in Davos.
This is the same sanatorium that inspired Nobel laureate Thomas Mann’s classic novel ‘The Magic Mountain’.
Davos’ annual affair with WEF began in 1971, when the Forum was known as the European Management Forum. That year, WEF founder Klaus Schwab invited over 400 European business leaders for a meeting at the Davos Congress Centre under the patronage of the European Commission.
Subsequently, WEF was formed, and leaders from across the world began congregating here at the end of January every year.
Over the years, the WEF annual meeting at Davos grew larger and has been host to many historic accords and meetings, including one draft agreement on Gaza and Jericho between the then-Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres and Palestine Liberation Organisation chairman Yasser Arafat in 1994.
In 1988, Greece and Turkey also signed their Davos Declaration here, which saw the two countries avoiding a war, while North and South Korea held their first ministerial-level meetings in Davos in 1989 — a year that also saw German Chancellor Helmut Kohl here discussing German reunification and then the knocking down of the Berlin Wall.
So far, only once has WEF held its annual meeting outside Davos, when in 2002, it decided to shift the venue to New York to show solidarity with that city and the American public after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Also, the WEF couldn’t hold a physical annual meeting in Davos in 2021 due to the COVID pandemic, while the 2022 meeting was postponed to May due to the pandemic. PTI BJ BAL
