WOLIN, Poland – After the local government decided to build an observation tower on top of a sandy hill on Wolin, an island in the Baltic Sea, a Polish archaeologist was called in to survey the site prior to construction and look for buried artifacts of the macabre past of the place.
The Hill of the Hanged, 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?
But what archaeologist Wojciech Filipowiak found when he started digging caused more excitement than disgust:
charred wood indicating the remains of a 10th century fortress that could help solve one of the great riddles of the Viking age.
Was the fearsome fortress mentioned in ancient texts a literary fantasy or a historical reality?
It has long been known that Norse warriors established outposts more than a millennium ago on Poland’s Baltic coast, enslaving indigenous Slavic peoples to supply a thriving slave trade, as well as trading in salt, amber and other goods.
However, the location of the largest Viking settlement in the area, a city and military fortress that early 12th-century texts called Jomsborg and linked to a mercenary order possibly mythical known as Jomsvikings.
Some modern scholars believe that Jomsborg was never a real place, but a legend handed down and embroidered over the centuries.
Findings on Hangmen Hill, on the island of Wolin, could change this view.
“It’s very exciting,” says Filipowiak, a Wolin researcher in the archeology 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 Vikings, once largely confined to a niche academic study, has skyrocketed in recent years as TV shows like “Game of Thrones,” movies, graphic novels, and video games have embraced — and distorted — Nordic themes, clothing and symbols.
The Viking Age, or at least an approximation of it, has become a fixture in popular culture.
This has been good news for Wolin’s tourism sector.
“Vikings are sexy and arousing a lot of interest,” says Ewa Grzybowska, mayor of Wolin, which includes a town and larger island district of the same name.
But the mayoress lamented that far fewer visitors come to her domain than to a nearby spa.
He said more money is needed to excavate and develop Wolin as a premier destination for Viking researchers and hobbyists.
Pointing from the Town Hall window to a square believed to contain a 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 contention.
Nazi archaeologists traced Wolin, which was part of Germany until 1945, looking for evidence of Viking presence and what the Nazis believed to be the superiority of the Nordic race and its dominance in the early Middle Ages over the indigenous peoples. local Slavs, who later identified themselves as Poles and claimed the land for Poland.
When Poland seized control of Wolin after World War II, Polish archaeologists searched for artifacts that would reinforce their country’s hold on former German lands and help reinforce feelings of National identity.
Wolin 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 Wolin’s history museum.
That changed when Poland abandoned communism and began to turn to the West, away from Russia and its emphasis on Slavic pride.
“After 1989, everyone wanted to be a Viking,” recalls Kokora.
The public’s fascination with the Vikings has also led to a boom in amateur historical research.
Among them is Marek Kryda, a Polish-American amateur historian and author of a controversial 2019 book that denounced Polish archeology as a swamp of ethnic chauvinismblind for the most part to the role the Vikings played in the early formation of Poland.
Kryda sparked a storm of controversy last summer in Poland after announcing in the British tabloid The Daily Mail that he had located the probable grave of Harald Bluetooth, the historic Danish Viking king who ruled the area.
The general opinion among historians is that Harald he probably died in the region at the end of the 10th century, but was buried in Denmark.
Kryda said she had located Harald’s burial mound in Wiejkowo, a small village inland from Wolin, using satellite images.
Filipowiak called it “pseudoscience”.
The furor over where Harald Bluetooth is buried has turned the Viking king – celebrated as the unifier of feuding Norse 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 Grzybowska district is a Slavic and Viking village, dotted with thatched-roof log cabins and a rune-inscribed stone celebrating Harald Bluetooth.
But these are modern forgeries, representations of a distant Viking past that excite the imagination but have been difficult to pin down with any certainty despite decades of excavations by archaeologists for traces of Jomsborg.
Kokora, the museum’s director, described the elusive 10th-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 of the map, leaving only traces of its existence in archaic texts.
It is said to have had thousands of inhabitants, a fortress, and a long dock to accommodate Viking ships sailing to and from Scandinavia and North America.
Thousands of kilometers away, in Morocco, traces of enslaved slavs who traded with the Baltic coast in the first millennium.
Examining shards of excavated pottery on a messy table in her museum, Kokora said the Vikings hadn’t bothered much with making pots 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, dug a mound on the opposite side of the city, on Hangmen Hill, hoping to find traces. of Jomsborg and proof that the Scandinavians, a major pillar of the Nazi ideology of Aryan supremacy, had been there first.
They found some artifacts, but no evidence of a Viking fortress.
Parts of Hanged Hill had been excavated before Filipowiak began excavation, but not the area selected for construction.
The archaeologist said his chance find of what he believes could be the walls of the 10th-century Jomsborg fortress still needed more analysis, but he believes that there is already “80% certainty” that it is the place.
The debate over the location of Jomsborg – or whether it really existed – has been “a very long discussion,” Filipowiak said.
“I hope I can help put an end to it.”
2023-05-24 13:10:03
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