Rungholt was wiped off the face of the earth. Really. in 1362 a violent hurricane This ship made its fury felt on the coasts of what are now the British Isles, the Netherlands and northern Germany and Denmark, sinking it into the waves of the North Sea. In 2023, at a moment when researchers learned a valuable lesson about the risks of climate change and rising oceans, water destroyed what had by then been a village in North Friesland.

The tragedy was so great that it has fueled all kinds of legends since the 14th century. There has been speculation for some time that Rungholt never existed, that it was a legendary city and was even called the “Atlantis of the North Sea”. Today, researchers argue that this is not the case. Not only that. We’ve gotten to know him better in recent weeks and can imagine what he’s like.

The reason: His church, a related temple that may have been 40 meters long and 15 meters high, according to evidence found by experts, has finally been located. They had to resort to a technology to identify this. allowed them to “look out” Beneath the Wadden Sea mudflats that cover the ruins of the church. In fact, for their research, they need to take advantage of the low tide and use a special framework that allows them to open small “windows” with one-square-meter excavations in the tidal flats.

Looking to the past and the future…

They made the discovery last year. But to understand its scope, it is necessary to go back a few centuries, to the 14th century and what was then known as the Duchy of Schleswig. There, on the North Sea coast, stood the city of Rungholt, a medieval trading post around which legends and unknowns were woven. In 2008, Deutsche Welle (DW), based in Bonn, was still repeating the debate about whether the villa existed or whether it was pure myth.

We saw Runghlot mentioned on a map of 1240, which inspired the cartographer Johannes Meyer centuries later, and his name also appears in a commercial agreement of 1361. rescue ruins There is a will dated 1345, allegedly related to the settlement, in which the name of the town is mentioned.

Thanks to these indicators, some researchers have begun to calculate that around 2,000 people lived in the settlement around the 14th century. However, the weight of the myth is great, and in songs, books and films its memory is mixed with fantasy and legends and presented as a kind of Atlantis.

The legend wasn’t helped by the fact that, as DW reported in 2008, scientists felt they did not have enough evidence to categorically confirm the existence of this ancient medieval city. It was pure fantasy.

How it is explained historically is less mysterious. Rungholt’s disappearanceIt was considered a legendary setting or royal villa.

What put an end to it, swept it from the coast and contributed to its equation even today with the legendary Atlantis, was a well-defined meteorological event: the Grote Mandrenke, or “Saint Marcellus Flood”, an extratropical hurricane. 16 January 1362 devastated much of the North Sea coast, including the British Isles, the Netherlands, northern Germany and Denmark.

The toll was brutal: The hurricane is estimated to have killed 25,000 people and caused entire towns to collapse. It is not a coincidence that this phenomenon is still known in this way today. The Great Drownings of People“The Great Drownings of Men.”

Everything about the settlement since then aroused admiration and shook their legends. There is even a scientific initiative called the Runghlot Project, supported by the German Research Foundation. This project focuses its research on the Schleswig-Holstein lowlands, a few kilometers off the coast of the Nordstrand peninsula, to locate ruins, reconstruct and map the coastal landscape. Ruins of 14th century settlements.

save the past

Researchers from the Rungholt Project and Wadden Sea have already made relevant findings. They found 54 of them during their examination in an area larger than 10 km2. terps -the name given to some artificial mounds created to provide a safe settlement for houses-, several drainage systems, a moat with a tidal gate harbour, and the site of two small churches. “The area should be considered one of the main documented sites of medieval Edomsharde,” they add.

A group of researchers from the universities of Kiel and Johannes Gutenberg, the Center for Baltic and Scandinavian Archeology and the Department of Archeology of Schleswig-Holstein managed last summer to find an important element of the settlement: buried remains, which they identified as a Rungholt church.

The first thing they detect is a unknown grouping two kilometers terps Medieval. While analyzing these in detail, they focused on one in particular. “The peculiarity of the discovery lies in the importance of the church as the center of a residential structure; due to the size of the church, it should be interpreted as a neighborhood of higher function,” ZBSA said.

The new temple thus adds to the findings collected by the researchers in the study area they have already located, an area of ​​more than 10 km2. terps, drainage systems, a moat with a tidal gate harbour, and the site of two small churches. “The area should be considered as one of the main historically documented sites in the medieval Edomsharde region,” say those responsible for the initiative.

“One of these terps It shows structures that can be interpreted as the foundations of a church measuring 40 x 15 meters. According to the statement made by Johannes Gutenberg University, initial research and excavations provided data on the structure and foundations of the sacred building.

The study is being carried out near the island of Hallig Südfall in the Wadden Sea, the world’s largest system of mud flats and interstitial beaches, recognized as a biosphere reserve by UNESCO.

To truly study them, researchers had to use technology. “The remains hidden beneath the marshes have been located and mapped by geophysical methods such as magnetic gradiometry, electromagnetic induction and seismic,” says geophysicist Dennis Wilken from the University of Kiel. “We selectively retrieve sediment cores, giving us unique information about the life of North Frisian settlers.” brings stories and new discoveries to light.

The discovery of the new temple buried in the Wadden is a success for archaeology but can be interpreted prospectively.

After all, as archaeologist Bente Majchczack reminds CBC, if the inhabitants succumbed to the violent hurricane of 1362, it was because an unsuitable area for human settlements that were particularly vulnerable to tides, but which they decided to occupy for agriculture due to the richness of its soil once the peat and water had been removed. “This went badly for them because they created huge vulnerabilities. One day their threshold was not enough.”

It happened in the 14th century. But it is not a speech or a lesson that is so far from us in the 21st century. “This is a really important problem that we face in many parts of the world today with sea level rise,” he concludes.

Pictures | Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz

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*An earlier version of this article was published in June 2023.