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A centuries-old mystery: Did this mysterious Viking city exist?

2023-05-24T13:19:36.151Z

Highlights: Archaeologist Wojciech Filipowiak began excavating on Wolin Hill. He found hints of a possible tenth-century Viking fortress. The discovery could help solve one of the great enigmas of the Viking age. Some modern scholars believe that Jomsborg was never a real place, but a legend passed down and embroidered over the centuries. But the findings at Hangmen Hill, in Wolin Island, could change this view, says Filipowakia.


Was Jomsborg's 'medieval New York' a literary fantasy or a historical reality? New archaeological discoveries could give us a clue.


WOLIN, Poland – After the local government decided to build an observation tower atop a sandy hill on Wolin, an island in the Baltic Sea, a Polish archaeologist was called in to check the site before construction and search for buried artifacts from the site's macabre past.

Hangman Hill, a public park, had once been an execution ground, a cemetery and, according to some, a place of human sacrifice, so who knew what grisly discoveries awaited us?

A runestone dedicated to Harald Bluetooth in a park in Wolin. Photo Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

But what archaeologist Wojciech Filipowiak found when he began excavating caused more excitement than disgust:

Charred wood that indicated the remains of a tenth-century fortress that could help solve one of the great enigmas of the Viking age.

Was the fearsome fortress mentioned in ancient texts a literary fantasy or a historical reality?

Norse warriors have long been known to have established outposts more than a millennium ago on Poland's Baltic coast, enslaving indigenous Slavic peoples to supply a flourishing slave trade, as well as trading salt, amber, and other commodities.

However, the location of the largest Viking settlement in the area, a city and military fortress that early twelfth-century texts called Jomsborg and linked to a possibly mythical mercenary order known as Jomsvikings, was unknown.

Some modern scholars believe that Jomsborg was never a real place, but a legend passed down and embroidered over the centuries.

The findings at Hangmen Hill, on Wolin Island, could change this view.

A field outside the village of Wiejkowo, Poland, where some believe Harald Bluetooth, a Danish Viking king who ruled in the area, was buried. Photo Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

"It's very exciting," says Filipowiak, a researcher at Wolin in the archaeology and ethnology section of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

"It could solve a mystery that goes back more than 500 years:

Where is Jomsborg?"

Interest in the Vikings, once largely confined to a niche of academic study, has skyrocketed in recent years as TV series such as "Game of Thrones," movies, graphic novels and video games have adopted — and distorted — Nordic themes, clothing and symbols.

The Viking Age, or at least an approximation to it, has become a fixture of popular culture.

This has been good news for Wolin's tourism sector.

"Vikings are sexy and arouse a lot of interest," says Ewa Grzybowska, mayor of Wolin, which includes a city and a larger island district of the same name.

Karolina Kokora, director of the Wolin history museum, examining pottery fragments and animal bones discovered during the latest excavation at Wolin. Photo Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

But the mayor lamented that her domains go far fewer visitors than to a nearby spa.

He said more money is needed to conduct excavations and develop Wolin as a premier destination for Viking and amateur researchers.

Pointing from the window of City Hall to a square believed to contain a treasure trove of unexcavated medieval artifacts, he said:

"Wherever you go, here is a treasure: "Wherever you go, here is a piece of history."

That history, however, has often been a source of discord.

Nazi archaeologists scoured Wolin, which was part of Germany until 1945, for evidence of the presence of Vikings and of what the Nazis believed was the superiority of the Nordic race and its dominance in the early Middle Ages over the local Slavic peoples, who later identified themselves as Poles and claimed the land for Poland.

When Wojciech Filipowiak began excavating on Wolin Hill, he found hints of a possible tenth-century Viking fortress Photo Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

When Poland took control of Wolin after World War II, Polish archaeologists searched for artifacts that would reinforce their country's dominance over the former German lands and help reinforce the sense of national identity.

Wolin's schools staged re-enactments of Viking invasions of the Polish Baltic coast and, for decades after World War II, "many more children wanted to be Slavs defending the island," says Karolina Kokora, director of the Wolin history museum.

That changed when Poland abandoned communism and began to turn westward, away from Russia and its emphasis on Slavic pride.

"After 1989, everyone wanted to be a Viking," Kokora recalls.

The public's fascination with the Vikings has also sparked a boom in amateur historical research.

vView of a recreated Viking settlement. "Vikings are sexy and arouse a lot of interest," says Ewa Grzybowska, mayor of Wolin. Photo Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Among them is Marek Kryda, a Polish-American amateur historian and author of a controversial 2019 book that denounced Polish archaeology as a swamp of ethnic chauvinism, largely blind to the role the Vikings played in Poland's early formation.

Kryda unleashed a storm of controversy last summer in Poland after announcing in the British tabloid The Daily Mail that it had located the probable grave of Harald Bluetooth, the historic Danish Viking king who ruled in this area.

The general opinion among historians is that Harald probably died in the region at the end of the tenth century, but was buried in Denmark.

Kryda said she had located Harald's tumulus in Wiejkowo, a small village in the interior of Wolin, using satellite imagery.

Filipowiak called it "pseudoscience."

The furor over where Harald Bluetooth is buried has turned the Viking king — celebrated as a unifier of warring Nordic fiefdoms and the inspiration for the name of a wireless technology designed to unite devices — into an agent of noisy division.

Grzybowska, the mayor, said she was not qualified to judge whether Harald was buried in her district, but added that she would be delighted if it were true.

"It would add a special splendor and grandeur to our island," he said.

In the district of Grzybowska there is a Slavic and Viking village, dotted with wooden huts with thatched roofs and a stone inscribed with runes celebrating Harald Bluetooth.

But these are modern forgeries, depictions of a distant Viking past that excites the imagination but has been difficult to pin down with certainty despite decades of excavations by archaeologists in search of vestiges of Jomsborg.

Kokora, the museum's director, described the elusive tenth-century settlement as a "medieval New York on the Baltic"—a trading center with a mixed population of Vikings, Germans, and Slavs—that had mysteriously disappeared from the map, leaving only hints of its existence in archaic texts.

It is said to have had thousands of inhabitants, a fortress and a long pier to accommodate the Viking ships that sailed to and from Scandinavia and to North America.

Thousands of kilometers away, in Morocco, vestiges of enslaved Slavs trading with the Baltic coast in the first millennium have been found.

Examining fragments of pottery excavated from a messy table in his museum, Kokora said the Vikings hadn't bothered much about making vessels and weren't very good at it.

"They just took from the Slavs," he said.

In the 1930s, German archaeologists, eager to refute Polish claims that the area had been settled mainly by Slavs, excavated a mound on the opposite side of the city, on Hangmen Hill, hoping to find vestiges of Jomsborg and evidence that the Scandinavians, an important pillar of Nazi ideology of Aryan supremacy, They had been there first.

They found some artifacts, but no evidence of a Viking fortress.

Parts of Hangman's Hill had been excavated before Filipowiak began excavating, but not the area selected for construction.

The archaeologist said his chance find of what he believes could be the walls of the tenth-century Jomsborg fortress still needed further analysis, but he believes there is already an "80% certainty" that it is the site.

The debate over Jomsborg's location — or whether it actually existed — has been "a very long discussion," Filipowiak said.

"I hope I can help put an end to it."

See also

3,000 years ago, Britain got half of its genes from... France?

The Vikings were already in America exactly 1,000 years ago

Source: clarin

All news articles on 2023-05-24

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