KINGSTON — This Sunday, on a frozen 22-metre stretch of Elbow Lake, north of Sydenham, a fading Austrian tradition springs to life.

Eisstock returns.

The ancient sport is making a comeback in this neck of the woods, only now it’s known by its anglicized handle, ice stock.

“It’s an interesting sport in that you don’t have to be particularly athletic to play it,” noted Karl Hammer Jr., head of the Kingston and Area Ice Stock Club. “Pretty much anyone can play it.”

Eisstock is no Johnny-come-lately pastime. A 16th-century painting by Belgian painter Pieter Brueghel depicts a game in progress. In the late 12th century, when messengers brought word to Austrian Duke Leopold V of Richard the Lionhearted’s capture, Leo the fifth was in the middle of an eisstock outing on the Danube.

The sport — it’s also known as Bavarian curling — derives its name from the implement that is thrown down the ice towards a daube, a doughnut-shaped object that sits in the middle of a three-by-six-metre rectangular house. The daube is about twice the size of a hockey puck while the stock, with its odd-looking 30-centimetre upright handle, is a thinner version of a curling stone weighing approximately 4.5 kilograms.

The stock closest to the daube scores three points with the next closest stocks scoring two points apiece. Should all four team members record points — a rare full house count of nine — tradition calls for that squad to let loose with its best yodel.

Another interpretation is distance eisstock in which competitors rear back and let ‘em fly. The stock can glide a half-kilometre or better, ideal for river play. Perhaps that’s what big Leo was playing that long-ago day on the blue Danube.

“It’s a very sociable sport,” said Hammer, whose father, Karl Sr., is one of the original enthusiasts who played during the sport’s local heyday in the late 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. The majority of those early twice-a-week practitioners were members of the old Austrian Club on Gardiners Road, Franz Moeslinger, Russel Rines, Willi Frankle, Kurt Weissenaider, the four Prohaska boys (Bert, Bill, Ernst, the late Ferdinand), to name a few.

“Sometimes we’d even play the Magna International team,” recalled 77-year-old Bill Prohaska, referring to the giant automotive supply conglomerate founded by Austrian immigrant Frank Stronach. “And sometimes we’d beat them, too,” he added with a measure of pride, “and that team had money behind it and some good players from the old country.”

With the closing of the Austrian Club in the early 1990s, the game’s popularity waned in Kingston and indeed throughout the country.

“Even the Kitchener club membership had dropped,” explained Hammer, a 39-year-old special education teacher at Sydenham High School. “It once had a high Germanic population of immigrants, but that, too, had fallen off.”

The notion to resurrect the sport occurred to Hammer a tad more than a dozen years ago. Cleaning out his parents’ house, he discovered a couple of his pop’s old eisstocks near a few beer steins, fitting for such a leisurely pursuit.

Hammer gave the mothballed stocks a successful test run on Gould Lake. Before long he and others of Austrian descent, including fellow high school teacher Jason Wimmer and Wimmer’s dad, Gerhardt, were sliding stocks in winter and summer, the latter on asphalt or cement.

Today the local club features 40 members, and not just of Austrian descent.

“With every passing generation,” Hammer wrote on the the club’s website (www.kingstoneisstock.webs.com), “it becomes that much more important to find a way to keep the traditions and culture of one’s heritage alive.

“… the playing of ice stock is a win-win outcome in that it allows the continuation of Germanic culture into the cultural mosaic of Canada.”

Sunday’s eight-team tournament on Elbow Lake commences at 9:30 a.m. and runs through to the early afternoon. To get there, drive north of Sydenham on the Bedford Road for approximately 15 minutes, then turn on the Salmon Lake Road. As you near the site, just to be sure, open the car windows and listen for a yodel.