Wolin

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Where the Oder loses itself in a tangle of channels and reed-banks before reaching the Baltic, the river splits around a long, low island. On its eastern shore, on the narrow Dziwna strait that divides the island from the Pomeranian mainland, the ground is dark with the refuse of centuries: ship-timbers, leather offcuts, amber waste, the bones of fish and cattle, coins struck in distant mints. For a few generations around the year 1000 this was one of the busiest places in the northern world — a town of craftsmen and merchants strung for kilometers along the water, where a Slavic god with three heads kept watch over a harbor that drew traders from half of Europe.

The town at the river-mouth

The island that the Germans called Wollin and the Poles call Wolin sits at the lower end of the Oder’s delta, screened from the open sea by the long sandbar of the neighboring island of Usedom. The setting is the whole explanation of the place. A vessel coming up out of the Baltic could slip through the Świna or the Dziwna into the sheltered lagoon of the Szczecin Haff, and from there the Oder ran south into the heart of the continent. Goods moving between the Scandinavian north of the Vikings, the lands of the Slavs, the river-routes of the Rus’, and the markets of the Frankish and Saxon west passed within reach of this one low shore.

A settlement took hold on the Dziwna in the eighth century and grew fast. By the middle of the tenth it was fortified with ramparts of timber and earth and laced with plank streets and quays, the main center of a Slavic tribe the chroniclers call the Wolinians — by some accounts the most powerful of the Pomeranian tribes, precisely because of the wealth the port poured into their hands. The mid-ninth-century survey known as the Bavarian Geographer credits the Wolinians with seventy strongholds. At its height the town spread for some four kilometers along the water, and archaeologists have ranked it with the great Baltic emporia of the age, alongside Hedeby on the Danish neck and Birka in the Swedish lakes.

It was a mixed town, and that mixture is the first thing the outside world recorded about it. Among the Slavic Wolinians lived Scandinavians, Saxons, and Rus’; the harbor handled amber and furs and slaves and honey, and the workshops worked bronze, bone, antler, glass, and iron. The amber came up out of the Baltic shallows and was cut and polished here for the markets of the south; the furs and the slaves came down the river-roads from the forest interior; the silver came in struck as coin from the Islamic east, through the Rus’, and was weighed out again by the gram on small folding scales whose pans turn up in the dig-layers. This was a place where languages and gods met without much insisting on agreement. The tenth-century Andalusian-Jewish traveler Ibrahim ibn Yaqub described a substantial town with many gates. Writing around 1075 in his history of the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, the chronicler Adam of Bremen reached for the strongest words he had. The town — he called it Iumne, Jumne — was, he wrote, “the largest of all the cities in Europe,” a place where Slavs and other peoples, “Greeks and barbarians,” gathered to trade, and where Saxon newcomers were welcome to settle on equal terms with the Wends on one strict condition: that they not make open profession of their Christianity. The faith of the town was not Christ’s.

Triglav, the three-headed

The god of the town was Triglav — the name means, plainly, “three-headed.” He was the chief deity of the Pomeranian Slavs, honored at Wolin and at the larger inland town of Szczecin (Stettin) and probably at Brandenburg as well, and his image carried three heads on one body. The priests of Szczecin gave the meaning of those heads to the missionaries who came to throw them down, and through those hostile witnesses the explanation survives: the god had three heads because he ruled three kingdoms — the heavens, the earth, and the world below. Over the eyes and mouth of the idol lay a covering of gold. This too the priests explained: the god veiled his face so that he should not see the sins of men, and held his peace so that he should not speak of them.

The northwestern Slavs built their gods such bodies and such houses. At Arkona on the island of Rügen stood the four-faced Svetovit, looking out to the four quarters; at Wolin and Szczecin the three faces of Triglav looked down through heaven, earth, and the dead. The likeness is no accident. These were neighboring peoples of the same Baltic coast, and their temples shared a grammar — many-headed images, treasure heaped in the sanctuary, a sacred horse that spoke for the god.

For Triglav kept a horse, and the horse was black. (Svetovit’s horse at Arkona was white.) The animal was held to be the god’s own mount, so holy that no man might ride it; the god rode it himself, by night, and a groom who found the beast lathered with sweat in the morning knew that his master had been abroad. The horse was used to read the divine will before any great undertaking. Spears were laid on the ground before the temple, and the horse was led across them; whether it crossed cleanly or struck the iron with a hoof told the watching crowd what the god intended. In a tradition reported of the rite, nine spears were set out and the horse passed three times over them — three for the three-headed god. By such signs a war-band would know whether to sail, and a city whether to fight or to wait. The same kind of equine oracle stood at the heart of the cult at Arkona; along this coast the gods spoke through horses, and men listened.

The three-headed Pomeranian god Triglav, an engraving from Bernard de Montfaucon’s L’Antiquité expliquée (Paris, 1722). Wikimedia Commons; public domain.

The cult was wealthy, as the town was wealthy. The sanctuary held offerings, and a tithe of plunder taken in war was set aside for the god. What is known of Triglav comes almost entirely from three Latin lives of the bishop who destroyed his image — the accounts of Ebbo, of Herbord, and of the anonymous monk of Prüfening, all written in the middle decades of the twelfth century, a generation or so after the events. They are the testimony of the victors, and they describe the god in order to celebrate his fall. Behind their polemic the outline of a real cult is visible: a triple-headed lord of the three worlds, a veiled face, a black oracle-horse, a treasure-house at the center of a pagan town. The neat genealogies and cosmic systems that later writers built around the Slavic gods are largely reconstruction; this much, recorded by men who saw the idol, is firmer ground.

Triglav imagined over the sea and a longship, a present-day painting by Marek Hapon. Wikimedia Commons; CC BY-SA 4.0.

Jómsborg and Vineta

A rich pagan port at the edge of the world of the Norse could not stay out of the sagas, and Wolin entered two of the north’s most enduring legends.

The first is Jómsborg. In the Old Norse tradition — the Jómsvíkinga saga, the Knýtlinga saga, the kings’ sagas of Snorri Sturluson — there stood somewhere on the Wendish coast a great sea-fortress called Jómsborg, home to the Jomsvikings, a brotherhood of picked warriors bound by a harsh code: no man admitted under eighteen or over fifty, none to flee before an enemy of equal strength, all plunder shared, no woman to be kept within the walls. The sagas tie the stronghold to Danish kings and captains — to Harald Bluetooth, or to the half-legendary Pálnatóki — and place its destruction in the 1040s. Many scholars have set Jómsborg at Wolin: the names Jumne, Julin, and Jóm seem to circle the same harbor, and the archaeology confirms a real Scandinavian presence in a real fortified town on exactly that coast.

The identification is contested, and should be held loosely. The saga material is late and literary, written in Iceland two centuries and more after the supposed events, and skeptical historians have doubted whether Jómsborg — or the Jomsvikings as an organized brotherhood — existed outside the storytellers’ imagination at all. Recent excavation under the direction of Wojciech Filipowiak, in a Polish-Danish project, has reopened the question of Wolin’s Scandinavian connections on archaeological rather than literary grounds. What is certain is the town; the fortress of the sagas is a possibility laid over it.

The second legend is Vineta. By the later Middle Ages a story had attached itself to this stretch of the Baltic of a fabulously rich city, the wealthiest in the north, drowned by the sea. In the telling, the citizens grew proud and sinful, portents went unheeded, and a great storm-tide swallowed the city whole; on still days, it was said, one could hear its bells ringing under the water. The drowned Vineta of the legend is almost certainly a memory of Wolin itself — of the same Jumne that Adam of Bremen had praised, its real decline transmuted into a moral catastrophe and a vanished golden city beneath the waves. The very name Vineta seems to be a later scribe’s misreading or reworking of Jumne; the city of bells under the water and the busy pagan emporium of the chroniclers are, in all likelihood, the same place seen twice — once as a fact and once as a fable. Wolin did not sink. But the wealth was real, and the fall, in its slower way, was real too, and a coast that had watched a great town dwindle and a great god toppled had reason to tell itself a story about pride and the sea.

The bishop and the silver heads

The fall, when it came, was a conquest and a conversion together. In 1124 Duke Bolesław III Wrymouth of Poland, who had brought Pomerania under his overlordship, secured a missionary of weight: Otto, bishop of Bamberg, a wealthy and well-connected prelate acting with the blessing of Pope Honorius II. Where an earlier, ascetic mission had come and failed, Otto came in strength — with a score of his own clergy, a train of servants, sixty armed men furnished by the duke, and wagons of gifts. He understood that in these towns the new faith would have to arrive looking at least as splendid as the old.

His first journey, in 1124–1125, took him through the Pomeranian towns — Pyrzyce, Kamień, Szczecin, Wolin among them — and the chronicles credit him with baptisms in the thousands and the founding of churches. At Szczecin he confronted the cult of Triglav directly. The great idol was broken; and Otto, the lives report, kept from the wreck the three silver-plated heads of the god and sent them to Rome, to the Pope, as a trophy of paganism overthrown. (The sources differ on the metal — one says the image was of gold, another that the heads were silver-covered wood — but agree that the heads went south as proof of victory.)

It did not hold the first time. When the bishop went home, the old observance crept back in the river-towns, and in 1128 Otto returned, now at the invitation of the Pomeranian duke Wartisław himself and with the backing of the Emperor Lothar, to steady the faith of Szczecin and Wolin where the people had “fallen back into idolatry.” At a great assembly on the island of Usedom in the summer of 1128 the Pomeranian nobility accepted Christianity. Otto would be remembered as the Apostle of Pomerania and canonized sixty years on. Triglav’s three faces, the black horse, the veiled idol of the three worlds — these passed out of the daylight record and into the memory of a conquered cult.

A bishopric was planted at Wolin to set the seal on the work; by a papal bull of 1140 it became the first episcopal see in Pomerania, its church dedicated to the martyr Adalbert. The cross now stood where Triglav had stood.

After the gods

The town did not long survive its conversion. The trade that had made Wolin was already shifting; new centers were rising, the Dziwna channel was unreliable for the deeper ships of the age, and in the later twelfth century the Danish fleets of Valdemar I came raiding down this coast and battered the town hard. The episcopal see was moved away within a generation. When a town was refounded on the site in the thirteenth century under German law, it was a modest place with no memory of having been one of the great emporia of the Baltic. The harbor that Adam of Bremen had called the largest city in Europe became a quiet provincial port, and then the legend of a drowned golden city grew up over the silence to explain what had been lost.

What the town actually was came back into view through the spade. From the twentieth century onward, systematic excavation on the Dziwna shore uncovered the ramparts, the plank streets, the wharves, the workshops, and the dense layered refuse of the early-medieval emporium, and made Wolin one of the key sites for understanding the Slavic and Viking Baltic — a place where, for once, the archaeology of contact between Slavs and Scandinavians can be read in the ground rather than guessed at from sagas. The work continues; the question of Jómsborg, raised and re-raised over the foundations, has never quite been laid to rest.

Reconstructed timber buildings at the open-air museum on the Dziwna at Wolin, modeled on the excavated early-medieval settlement. Photograph by Klugschnacker, Wikimedia Commons; CC BY-SA 3.0.

On an islet in the strait, opposite the modern town, the early-medieval settlement has been rebuilt in timber — a palisade and gate, a wharf, huts raised on the evidence of the digs, and within a fenced precinct a wooden idol standing again where the sacred enclosure would have been. Each summer since the early 1990s the place fills for the Festival of Slavs and Vikings, when reenactors in mail and linen pitch camp on the old ground and stage the trade, the crafts, and the battles of the vanished port. It has grown into one of the largest events of its kind in Europe. The three-headed god is gone from the river-mouth, and the city under the sea was never there to begin with. The town that gave rise to both — the real one, of amber and ship-timber and the black horse led across the spears — lies in the dark earth along the Dziwna, and once a year its ghost is invited back to play itself.

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