What the legend says

According to the Polish Wikipedia, Vineta is a legendary stronghold and port with a lighthouse at the mouth of the Oder, a large trading centre, bigger than most European cities known at the time. The legend says that the rich city was punished for the wrongdoings of its inhabitants and swallowed by the sea, and that its ruins were said to rise from the depths from time to time. Wikipedia links this motif with a later literary tradition that grew up around old accounts of the city.

The starting point is medieval records. The Polish Wikipedia recalls that the Arab traveller Ibrahim ibn Yaqub wrote about a great city on the Baltic around 965, and that Adam of Bremen around 1075 described its location: from the city it was supposedly a short voyage to Demmin at the mouth of the Peene. According to the same Wikipedia, the chronicler also reported that in 1043 the Norwegian king Magnus I the Good set out against this city with a great fleet and captured it. The name Vineta appears in the accounts in various forms: in the German Wikipedia we read that Helmold of Bosau copied almost verbatim from Adam the passages about this place (the time given there is 1163-1168, that is, the 12th century), and that in the chapter heading of all the surviving manuscripts the form Vinneta appears. The Polish Wikipedia dates Helmold's work to the 13th century, so the two entries give different dates.

Where Vineta was sought

From the 16th century people tried to find the city on a map. According to the Polish Wikipedia, it was first thought to have lain off Koserow on Uznam (Usedom), then off neighbouring Damerow, and in the 17th century attention was drawn to the north-western part of the island and the nearby island of Ruden. The Pomeranian chronicler Thomas Kantzow placed the city on the seashore at Damerow, today part of Koserow. According to Wikipedia, Johannes Bugenhagen, who sailed around the area in 1535, wrote about the remains of a drowned city on the seabed, and Kantzow was able on that basis to indicate the layout of its streets. This version collapsed: surveys of the seabed from the early 19th century showed that at this spot there are reef rocks, not remains of buildings.

The German Wikipedia adds that on maps of Pomerania from around 1564 and 1573 Vineta is drawn as a small island off Uznam (Usedom), and that on Lubinus's map from around 1618 there is a Latin inscription beside it about the destruction of the city by the king of Denmark.

Vineta or Wolin

The turn towards Wolin came in the 19th century. In 1847 Robert Klempin published in “Baltische Studien” a work in which he argued that the name Vineta could have arisen from a misreading of the word Jumneta in Adam of Bremen. According to Wikipedia, Klempin took Jumneta to be Jomsborg, and Jomsborg to be Julin, that is Wolin, so all these names would denote the same place at different stages of its development. Earlier, in 1378, the chronicler Ernst von Kirchberg regarded Vineta, Julin and Wolin as one.

In 1897 Adolf Stubenrauch of the museum in Szczecin, together with the geologist Müller, checked all the locations indicated in the accounts and, as Wikipedia states, concluded that the only place on Uznam (Usedom) and Wolin that meets the conditions of the old Vineta is Wolin. Rudolf Virchow, according to the German Wikipedia, was convinced that Vineta was Wolin. The same Wikipedia states that the thesis of the identity of Vineta, Jumne, Julin and Jomsborg with the early town on the site of today's Wolin has been widely accepted in Pomeranian historiography since Adolf Hofmeister formulated it in 1931-1932. German and Polish excavations showed that from the 10th to the 12th century there stood a large centre of maritime trade with a multi-ethnic settlement. The museum in Wolin notes, however, that in the 1930s the search for Vineta and Jomsborg had great propaganda potential for the Third Reich.

The dispute has not died down. According to the Polish Wikipedia, some researchers, including some from Berlin, locate Vineta near Barth, citing changes in the Oder delta after about 1200. The German Wikipedia states that the Barth thesis was put forward in 1999 by Klaus Goldmann and Günter Wermusch, and the local museum is called the Vineta-Museum, but according to the same entry no targeted archaeological research had been carried out in the area by 2016, so the thesis rests on the interpretation of chance finds. The Polish Wikipedia sums up that the lack of unambiguous evidence prevents full verification of the location.

Vineta in poetry and on stage

The legend found its way into literature and music. According to the German Wikipedia, the poem “Vineta” was written by Wilhelm Müller (in the cycle “Muscheln von der Insel Rügen”, 1825), and the drowned city was also written about by Heinrich Heine (“Seegespenst”, 1826) and Ferdinand Freiligrath (“Meerfahrt”, 1838). The same list names the novel “Das Kreuz von Vineta” by Aurel Meinhold from 1870 and several operas, among them a work by Heinrich Frankenberger from 1851. The Polish Wikipedia points to the opera “Legenda Bałtyku” (Legend of the Baltic) by Feliks Nowowiejski, whose premiere took place, according to the German entry, in Poznań in 1924.

Today the legend is told by the Regional Museum in Wolin: according to the museum's website, the last room of the permanent exhibition includes, among other things, the story of Vineta. On the Dziwna, next to the museum, lies also the port in Wolin, the place most often linked with the old port of the accounts.