After the native authorities determined to construct an commentary tower atop a sandy hill on Wolin, an island within the Baltic Sea, a Polish archaeologist was referred to as in to examine the positioning earlier than development and search for buried artifacts from the spot’s macabre previous.
Hangmen’s Hill, a public park, had in earlier occasions been an execution floor, a cemetery and, some consider, a spot for human sacrifices — so who knew what grisly discoveries have been in retailer?
But what the archaeologist, Wojciech Filipowiak, discovered when he began digging brought about extra pleasure than distaste: charcoaled wooden indicating the stays of a Tenth-century stronghold that would assist resolve one of many nice riddles of the Viking Age.
Was a fearsome fortress talked about in historic texts a literary fantasy or a historic actuality?
It has lengthy been recognized that Nordic warriors established outposts greater than a millennium in the past on Poland’s Baltic coast, enslaving indigenous Slavic peoples to provide a booming slave commerce, as effectively buying and selling in salt, amber and different commodities.
Not recognized, nevertheless, was the situation of the Vikings’ greatest settlement within the space, a city and navy stronghold that early Twelfth-century texts referred to as Jomsborg and linked to a probably legendary mercenary order often known as Jomsvikings.
Some fashionable students consider that Jomsborg was by no means an actual place, however as a substitute a legend handed down and embroidered via the ages. The findings at Hangmen’s Hill on Wolin Island would possibly alter that view.
“It is very exciting,” stated Dr. Filipowiak, a scholar in Wolin with the archaeology and ethnology part of Poland’s Academy of Sciences. “It could solve a mystery going back more than 500 years: Where is Jomsborg?”
Interest in Vikings, as soon as largely confined to a distinct segment discipline of educational examine, has surged lately as tv sequence like “Game of Thrones,” films, graphic novels and video video games have embraced — and distorted — Norse themes, clothes and symbols. The Viking Age, or at the very least a tough approximation of it, has change into a fixture of well-liked tradition.
This has been good news for the tourism business in Wolin. “Vikings are sexy and attract a lot of interest,” stated Ewa Grzybowska, the mayor of Wolin, which features a city and a wider island district with identical identify.
But the mayor bemoaned that far fewer guests come to her area than to a close-by seashore resort. She stated extra money was wanted to hold out excavation work and develop Wolin as a world-class vacation spot for Viking researchers and newbie fans.
Pointing out of her window in City Hall to a sq. that’s believed to include a treasure of unexcavated early medieval artifacts, she stated: “Wherever you go here, there is a piece of history.”
That historical past, nevertheless, has usually been a supply of discord.
Nazi archaeologists scoured Wolin, which was a part of Germany till 1945, for proof of the presence of Vikings — and for proof of what the Nazis believed was the prevalence of the Nordic race and its dominance within the early medieval interval over native Slavic peoples, who later got here to establish themselves as Poles and claimed the land for Poland.
When Poland took management of Wolin after World War II, Polish archaeologists hunted for artifacts that will improve their nation’s maintain on former German lands and assist reinforce a way of nationwide identification.
Schools in Wolin organized re-enactments of Viking invasions of Poland’s Baltic coast and, for many years after World War II, “far more kids wanted to be Slavs defending the island,” stated Karolina Kokora, director of Wolin’s historical past museum.
That modified after Poland ditched communism and started turning West, away from Russia and its emphasis on Slavic delight. “After 1989, everyone wanted to be a Viking,” Ms. Kokora recalled.
Public fascination with Vikings has additionally led to a surge in historic sleuthing by amateurs.
Among them is Marek Kryda, a Polish American newbie historian and writer of a polemical 2019 e-book that denounced Polish archaeology as a morass of ethnic chauvinism principally blind to the function Vikings performed within the early formation of Poland.
Mr. Kryda set off a storm of controversy final summer season in Poland after he introduced in The Daily Mail, a British tabloid, that he had situated the doubtless grave of Harald Bluetooth, the historic Danish Viking king who as soon as dominated on this space.
The consensus view amongst historians is that Harald most likely died within the area on the finish of the Tenth century however had been buried in Denmark.
Mr. Marek stated he had positioned Harald’s doubtless burial mound in Wiejkowo, a tiny village inland from Wolin, through the use of satellite tv for pc imaging. Dr. Filipowiak dismissed that as “pseudoscience.”
The furor over the place Harald Bluetooth is buried has turned the Viking king — celebrated as a unifier of feuding Nordic fiefs and the inspiration for the identify of a wi-fi expertise designed to unite units — into an agent of noisy division.
Ms. Grzybowska, the mayor, stated she was not certified to evaluate whether or not Harald was buried in her district however added that she can be delighted if true. “It would add special splendor and grandeur to our island,” she stated.
Ms. Grzybowska’s district has a Slavs and Viking Village, dotted with thatched wood huts and a stone inscribed with runes celebrating Harald Bluetooth. But these are fashionable fakes — representations of a distant Viking previous that excites the creativeness however has been laborious to pin down with certainty regardless of the a long time of digging by archaeologists in search of traces of Jomsborg.
Ms. Kokora, the museum director, described the elusive Tenth-century settlement as a “medieval New York on the Baltic” — a buying and selling entrepôt with a blended inhabitants of Vikings, Germanic folks and Slavs — that had mysteriously vanished from the map, leaving solely whiffs of its existence in archaic texts.
It is claimed to have had hundreds of inhabitants, a fortress and an extended pier to accommodate the Viking ships that sailed to and from Scandinavia and so far as North America. Traces of enslaved Slavs traded alongside the Baltic coast within the first millennium have been discovered hundreds of miles away in Morocco.
Sifting via shards of excavated pottery on a cluttered desk in her museum, Ms. Kokora stated the Vikings hadn’t bothered a lot with making pots and weren’t excellent at it. “They just took from the Slavs,” she stated.
In the Thirties, German archaeologists, wanting to problem Polish claims that the world had initially been settled primarily by Slavs, excavated a mound on the other aspect of city from Hangmen’s Hill within the hope of discovering traces of Jomsborg — and proof that Scandinavians, an vital pillar of the Nazi ideology of Aryan supremacy, had been there first. They discovered some artifacts however no proof of a Viking stronghold.
Parts of Hangmen’s Hill had been excavated earlier than Dr. Filipowiak began digging, however not the world chosen for development. The archaeologist stated his serendipitous discover of what he thinks could possibly be the ramparts of Tenth-century Jomsborg’s stronghold nonetheless wanted extra evaluation, however he believes there’s already “80 percent certainty” that that is the positioning.
The debate over Jomsborg’s location — or if it actually existed — has been “a very long discussion,” Dr. Filipowiak stated. “Hopefully, I can help end it.”
Source: www.nytimes.com