From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   A Centuries-Old Mystery: Did This Elusive Viking City Exist?   
   By Andrew Higgins, May 18, 2023, NY Times   
      
   It has long been known that Nordic warriors established outposts more than a   
   millennium ago on Poland’s Baltic coast, enslaving indigenous Slavic peoples   
   to supply a booming slave trade, as well trading in salt, amber and other   
   commodities.   
      
   Not known, however, was the location of the Vikings’ biggest settlement in   
   the area, a town and military stronghold that early 12th-century texts called   
   Jomsborg and linked to 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 might alter that view.   
      
   “It is very exciting,” said Dr. Wojciech Filipowiak, a scholar in Wolin   
   with the archaeology and ethnology section of Poland’s Academy of Sciences.   
   “It could solve a mystery going back more than 500 years: Where is   
   Jomsborg?”   
      
   Interest in Vikings, once largely confined to a niche field of academic study,   
   has surged in recent years as television series like “Game of Thrones,”   
   movies, 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 of popular culture.   
      
   This has been good news for the tourism business in Wolin. “Vikings are sexy   
   and attract a lot of interest,” said Ewa Grzybowska, the mayor of Wolin,   
   which includes a town and a wider island district with same name.   
      
   But the mayor bemoaned that far fewer visitors come to her domain than to a   
   nearby beach resort. She said more money was needed to carry out excavation   
   work and develop Wolin as a world-class destination for Viking researchers and   
   amateur enthusiasts.   
      
   Pointing out of her window in City Hall to a square that is believed to   
   contain a treasure of unexcavated early medieval artifacts, she said:   
   “Wherever you go here, there 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 for proof of what the Nazis   
   believed was the superiority of the Nordic race and its dominance in the early   
   medieval period over local    
   Slavic peoples, 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 enhance their country’s hold on former   
   German lands and help reinforce a sense of national identity.   
      
   Schools in Wolin organized re-enactments of Viking invasions of Poland’s   
   Baltic coast and, for decades after World War II, “far more kids wanted to   
   be Slavs defending the island,” said Karolina Kokora, director of Wolin’s   
   history museum.   
      
   That changed after Poland ditched communism and began turning West, away from   
   Russia and its emphasis on Slavic pride. “After 1989, everyone wanted to be   
   a Viking,” Ms. Kokora recalled.   
      
   Public fascination with Vikings has also led to a surge in historical   
   sleuthing by amateurs.   
      
   Among them is Marek Kryda, a Polish American amateur historian and author of a   
   polemical 2019 book that denounced Polish archaeology as a morass of ethnic   
   chauvinism mostly blind to the role Vikings played in the early formation of   
   Poland.   
      
   Mr. Kryda set off a storm of controversy last summer in Poland after he   
   announced in The Daily Mail, a British tabloid, that he had located the likely   
   grave of Harald Bluetooth, the historical Danish Viking king who once ruled in   
   this area.   
      
   The consensus view among historians is that Harald probably died in the region   
   at the end of the 10th century but had been buried in Denmark.   
      
   Mr. Marek said he had placed Harald’s likely burial mound in Wiejkowo, a   
   tiny village inland from Wolin, by using satellite imaging. 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 fiefs and the inspiration for the   
   name of a wireless technology designed to unite devices — into an agent of   
   noisy division.   
      
   Ms. 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 true.   
   “It would add special splendor and grandeur to our island,” she said.   
      
   Ms. Grzybowska’s district has a Slavs and Viking Village, dotted with   
   thatched wooden huts and a stone inscribed with runes celebrating Harald   
   Bluetooth. But these are modern fakes — representations of a distant Viking   
   past that excites the    
   imagination but has been hard to pin down with certainty despite the decades   
   of digging by archaeologists looking for traces of Jomsborg.   
      
   Ms. Kokora, the museum director, described the elusive 10th-century settlement   
   as a “medieval New York on the Baltic” — a trading entrepôt with a   
   mixed population of Vikings, Germanic people and Slavs — that had   
   mysteriously vanished from the    
   map, leaving only whiffs 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 as far as   
   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 shards of excavated pottery on a cluttered table in her   
   museum, Ms. Kokora said the Vikings hadn’t bothered much with making pots   
   and were not very good at it. “They just took from the Slavs,” she said.   
      
   In the 1930s, German archaeologists, eager to challenge Polish claims that the   
   area had originally been settled mainly by Slavs, excavated a mound on the   
   opposite side of town from Hangmen’s Hill in the hope of finding traces of   
   Jomsborg — and proof    
   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.   
      
      
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