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 inspect the site before construction and look for buried artifacts of the place’s macabre past.
The Colle degli Impiccati, a public park, had once been a place of executions, a cemetery and, according to some, a place of human sacrifices, so who knows what macabre discoveries awaited us?
But what archaeologist Wojciech Filipowiak discovered when he started digging caused more excitement than disgust:
charred wood indicating the remains of a Fortress of the X century which could help solve one of the great puzzles 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 provide a thriving slave trade, as well as trading 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 related to A mercenary order perhaps 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.
Finds on Hangmen Hill on Wolin Island may change this opinion.
“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 dates 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 television shows like “Game of Thrones,” movies, graphic novels, and video games have embraced — and twisted — themes , clothes and Nordic symbols .
The Viking Age, or at least an approximation of it, has become a fixture in popular culture.
This was 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.
But the mayor has complained 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 prime destination for Viking researchers and hobbyists.
Pointing from the Town Hall window to a square believed to contain a treasure trove of unexcavated medieval artifacts, he said:
“Wherever you go, here’s a treasure: ‘Wherever you go, here’s a piece of history.’
That story, however, has often been a source of contention.
Nazi archaeologists tracked down Wolin, which was part of Germany until 1945, looking for evidence of Viking presence and what the Nazis believed was the superiority of the Nordic race and its early medieval dominance over the local indigenous Slavic populations, which they later identified as Poles and claimed the land for Poland.
When Poland took control of Wolin after World War II, Polish archaeologists searched for artifacts that would strengthen their country’s hold on former German lands and help strengthen feelings of National identity.
Wolin’s schools staged reenactments of the Viking invasions of Poland’s 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.
This changed when Poland abandoned Communism and began turning to the West, moving away from Russia and its emphasis on Slavic pride.
“After 1989, everyone wanted to be Vikings,” Kokora recalls.
The public’s fascination with 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 morass of ethnic chauvinismblind for the most part to the role Vikings played in the early formation of Poland.
Kryda sparked a firestorm of controversy last summer in Poland after it announced in British tabloid The Daily Mail that it had located the probable grave of Harald Bluetooth, the historic Danish Viking king who ruled the area.
The general opinion among historians is that Harold he probably died in the region in the late 10th century, but was buried in Denmark.
Kryda said it had located Harald’s burial mound in Wiejkowo, a small village inland from Wolin, using satellite images.
Filipowiak called him “pseudoscience”.
The furore 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 join devices — into an agent of noisy division.
Grzybowska, the mayor, said she was not qualified to judge whether Harald was buried in her precinct, but added 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 log cabins and a rune-engraved stone celebrating Harald Bluetooth.
But these are modern forgeries, representations of a distant Viking past that stir the imagination but have been difficult to pin down with certainty despite decades of digging 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 trade 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 pier to house the Viking ships that sailed 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 bits of pottery dug up 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 disprove Polish claims that the area had been inhabited mainly by Slavs, excavated a mound on the opposite side of the city on Hanged Man’s Hill, hoping to find traces of Jomsborg and the evidence 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.
Archaeologist said his chance discovery of what he believes could be 10th-century Jomsborg fortress walls is still needed more analysis, but believes there is already “80% certainty” that it is the place.
The debate over where Jomsborg is – or whether it even exists – has been “a very long discussion,” Filipowiak said.
“I hope I can help put an end to this.”
Source: Clarin
Mary Ortiz is a seasoned journalist with a passion for world events. As a writer for News Rebeat, she brings a fresh perspective to the latest global happenings and provides in-depth coverage that offers a deeper understanding of the world around us.