Rungholt is the ancient city that was destroyed in the floods and is said to have been buried under the Atlantis Ocean. It has long been referred to as the ‘Atlantis of the North Sea’ (although it is worth noting that scientists generally agree that Atlantis is a myth invented 2300 years ago by the Greek philosopher Plato).
Now, archaeologists have discovered a church buried under the ocean at the site of the lost village of Rungholt, one of many European settlements that disappeared overnight when a massive storm surge hit the North Sea coast in January 1362.
The Great Drowning of Men event, which is thought to have killed 25,000 people in all, submerged entire towns, and gave Rungholt the moniker “the Atlantis of the North Sea.” The ruinous settlement remains still undiscovered today, more than 650 years later, beneath muddy flats close to the German island of Hallig Südfall, which can only be reached during low tide.
“The fabled site of Rungholt was one of many parishes in North Frisia, which were destroyed in the flood of 1362. It is not the only drowned medieval village in Europe but the extent of the lost cultural landscape, the myths that were later spun around it and the great state of preservation make it unique. The North Frisian Wadden Sea, and the find spot of Rungholt near Hallig Südfall are a landscape where you can really experience how man lived in a difficult environment and ultimately lost.” said Bente Majchczack, an archaeologist at the ROOTS Cluster of Excellence at Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel.
Majchczack and his colleagues in the RUNGHOLT project, an archaeological investigation of the site funded by the German Research Foundation, have been surveying this mysterious site for years. With the discovery of a series of medieval mounds that stretch for more than a mile along the tidal flats, researchers achieved a significant advancement last month.
The buildings discovered by geophysical probes and sediment core excavations contain the outline of a church measuring approximately 40 feet by 130 feet. The subterranean structure appears to be similar to other Medieval churches that have survived to the current day in this part of Frisia.
According to a statement from the RUNGHOLT project, the larger dimensions of the newly discovered building distinguish it as Rungholt’s main church.
Majchczack said “The search for the church of Rungholt was always a focus and often discussed. A main question was always the character of Rungholt as such -was it a town, even a city or just a regular, but possibly important village in the marshes? – Our work now gives extended insight into the structure of the quite large marsh settlement. It of course lacks everything that scholars would need to define it as urban or a town, but we see that it was large, systematic and had a surprisingly large church.”
The storm surge, which was fueled by an extratropical cyclone, swept over a significant portion of the North Sea coast, including the British Isles, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. It was one of several natural disasters that occurred during this time period that destroyed towns and changed the North Sea shoreline, which had previously been unstable due to human activities.
Rungholt’s legend haunted Europe for decades after it was flooded, and tales that its inhabitants were being punished by God for their misdeeds persisted. The location of these extinct civilizations was unknown until the 1920s, when a local farmer by the name of Andreas Busch started looking into the flats near Hallig Südfall.
“Busch was the first to systematically record these traces, publish them to a wide audience and link it to the myth of Rungholt,” Majchczack said. “In the end, we might never know whether the settlements at Hallig Südfall really are the medieval site of Rungholt or one of the other drowned sites. Nobody has found a street sign yet.”
“We try to get the whole scale of the settlement and how it was embedded in the landscape, how it was connected to the neighboring areas and settlements, how they structured the landscape and so on,” Majchczack said. “There remains a lot to be found!”