Tam Eastley tracks down the creator of the city’s mysterious Kork-Yogis…

I first noticed them in the spring of 2010. My best friend Lisa was visiting from San Francisco, and we were walking to my favourite pizza place on the corner of Hertzbergstraße and Richardplatz in the heart of Rixdorf.

Lisa was taking note of every aspect of her surroundings: gazing at cobblestones, gushing at the urban gardens in front of a block of apartments, and slowly pronouncing the odd-sounding German words on the decorated street signs written in old-fashioned loopy letters. This corner of Berlin, to her at least, was exciting and new.

‘What’s that?’ she asked, pointing towards the sign for Hertzbergstraße. Shielding my eyes from the midday sun, I looked up and saw a little cork figure perched on the street sign. He was about two inches tall and was leaning over his front leg with one arm reaching up towards the sky, in what appeared to be a yoga pose.

We laughed at the cuteness of the figure, then ducked into the dark interior of the pizza place. The next day, en route to the Turkish Market on Maybachufer, we spotted another cork figure on top of a different street sign. This one was also in a yoga pose: sitting down, legs out in front, arms stretching forwards to touch them.

Despite being placed just above eye level atop the city’s street signs and therefore easy to miss, once we knew the little cork men were there, we started to notice them everywhere, even from the farthest of distances. I found one about five metres from my house while walking to the grocery store, and another while biking to Görlitzer Park, perched on Weigandufer in front of a new little canal-side café. I started spotting them far outside my usual stomping grounds too: Badstraße in Wedding, for example, and Fritz-Erler-Allee in the Gropiusstadt.

I became obsessed. I began to take pictures and made a map, as if I were on some kind of urban treasure hunt. I started to analyse all the different yoga poses: Sarvangasana, the shoulder stand; Virabhadrasana II, the warrior pose; Ardha Chandrasana, the half moon—although it was sometimes hard to tell exactly what they were doing from down below at street level.

Often the little figures would be gone after a few days, and this transient aspect became part of their mystery. The first two Lisa and I discovered were gone a few weeks after she was. The first one that I discovered by myself, after Lisa left, had vanished by the next time she visited. I once saw a street sign with two little cork feet glued to the top, the rest of him having apparently disappeared.

Late at night, walking home in Rixdorf, I would dream about finding their creator. I imagined a black-clad man in a leather jacket, hard-edged but serene, teetering at the top of a rusty ladd…