An ancient mystery: did this elusive Viking city exist?
After the local government decided to build a watchtower on top of a sand hill on Wolin, an island in the Baltic Sea, a Polish archaeologist was brought in to check the site before construction and search for buried artifacts from the site’s macabre past.
Hangmen’s Hill, a public park, used to be an execution site, burial ground and, some say, a place for human sacrifice – so who knew what gruesome discoveries were in store?
But what the archaeologist, Wojciech Filipowiak, discovered when he started digging caused more excitement than revulsion: charred wood that hinted at the remains of a 10th-century stronghold that could help solve one of the great riddles of the Viking Age .
Was a terrifying fortress mentioned in ancient texts a literary fantasy or a historical reality?
It has long been known that Nordic warriors established outposts on Poland’s Baltic coast more than a millennium ago, enslaving native Slavic peoples to provide for a thriving slave trade, as well as trade in salt, amber, and other raw materials.
Unknown, however, was the location of the largest Viking settlement in the area, a city and military stronghold referred to as Jomsborg in early 12th-century texts and associated with a possibly mythical mercenary order known as Jomsvikings.
Some modern scholars believe that Jomsborg was never a real place, but instead a legend handed down and embroidered through the ages. The findings at Hangmen’s Hill on Wolin Island could change that view.
“It’s very exciting,” said Dr. Filipowiak, a scholar in Wolin with the Department of Archeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. “It could solve a mystery stretching back more than 500 years: Where is Jomsborg?”
Interest in Vikings, once largely confined to a niche area of academic research, has exploded in recent years as television series such as “Game of Thrones,” films, graphic novels, and video games have embraced — and distorted — Norse themes, clothing, and symbols. The Viking Age, or at least a rough approximation of it, has become a fixture in popular culture.
This was good news for the tourism industry in Wolin. “Vikings are sexy and attract a lot of interest,” said Ewa Grzybowska, the mayor of Wolin, which includes a town and larger island district of the same name.
But the mayor complained that there are far fewer visitors to her domain than to a nearby seaside resort. She said more money was needed to carry out excavations and develop Wolin into a world-class destination for Viking researchers and amateur enthusiasts.
Pointing from her window in the Town Hall to a square believed to contain a treasure trove of unexcavated early medieval artifacts, she said, “Wherever you go, there’s a piece of history.”
However, that history has often been a source of controversy.
Nazi archaeologists scoured Wolin, part of Germany until 1945, for evidence of the presence of Vikings – and for evidence of what the Nazis believed was the superiority of the Nordic race and its dominance over local Slavic peoples in the early Middle Ages , who later came to identify themselves as Poles and claimed the land for Poland.
When Poland took control of Wolin after World War II, Polish archaeologists hunted for artifacts that would strengthen their country’s grip on former German lands and help cement a sense of national identity.
Schools in Wolin staged reenactments of Viking invasions on Poland’s Baltic coast, and for decades after World War II, “many more kids wanted to be Slavs defending the island,” says Karolina Kokora, director of Wolin’s history museum.
That changed after 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,” Ms. Kokora recalls.
The public fascination with Vikings has also led to an increase in amateur historical sleuthing.
Among them is Marek Kryda, a Polish-American amateur historian and author of a 2019 polemic book denouncing Polish archeology as a quagmire of ethnic chauvinism largely blind to the role Vikings played in Poland’s early formation .
Mr Kryda caused a storm of controversy in Poland last summer after he announced in The Daily Mail, a British tabloid, that he had found the probable grave of Harald Bluetooth, the historic Danish Viking king who once reigned in this area.
The consensus among historians is that Harald probably died in the region in the late 10th century, but was buried in Denmark.
Mr Marek said he had located the likely Harald burial mound in Wiejkowo, a small village inland from Wolin, using satellite imagery. Dr. Filipowiak dismissed that as “pseudoscience.”
The furor over where Harald Bluetooth is buried has turned the Viking king — celebrated as a unifier of feuding Nordic fiefdoms and the inspiration for the name of a wireless technology designed to unite devices — into an agent of vociferous division.
Ms. Grzybowska, the mayor, said she was not qualified to judge whether Harald was buried in her district, but added she would be very happy if that were true. “It would add a special splendor and grandeur to our island,” she said.
Mrs. Grzybowska’s district has a Slave and Viking village, dotted with wooden huts with thatched roofs and a stone carved with runes in honor of Harald Bluetooth. But these are modern forgeries – representations of a distant Viking past that capture the imagination but have been difficult to pin down with certainty despite decades of digging by archaeologists looking for traces of Jomsborg.
Ms. Kokora, the museum’s director, described the elusive 10th-century settlement as a “medieval New York on the Baltic Sea” – a trading warehouse with a mixed population of Vikings, Teutons and Slavs – that had mysteriously disappeared from the map and left only a hint 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 even North America. Traces of enslaved Slavs traded along the Baltic coast in the first millennium have been found thousands of miles away in Morocco.
Sifting through the shards of unearthed pottery on a cluttered table in her museum, Ms. Kokora said the Vikings hadn’t put much effort into making pots and weren’t very good at it. “They just took it from the Slavs,” she said.
In the 1930s, German archaeologists, eager to refute Polish claims that the area was originally inhabited mainly by Slavs, dug up a hill on the opposite side of the city from Hangmen’s Hill in hopes of finding traces of Jomsborg – and evidence that Scandinavians, an important pillar of the Nazi ideology of Aryan supremacy, had been there first. They found some artifacts, but no evidence of a Viking stronghold.
Parts of Hangmen’s Hill had been excavated before Dr. Filipowiak started digging, but not the area selected for construction. The archaeologist said his accidental finding of what he thinks could be the ramparts of the 10th-century Jomsborg stronghold required further analysis, but he believes there is already “80 percent certainty” that this is the location.
The debate over Jomsborg’s location — or whether it actually existed — was “a very long discussion,” said Dr. Filipowiak. “Hopefully I can help put an end to it.”