You’ve heard about Atlantis and El Dorado, legendary cities that disappeared and may have never existed at all. This year, we also learned about Dunwich and Heracleion that really did disappear into the ocean. Germany has its own lost city, named Rungholt. Except it was in Denmark when it disappeared.
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Rungholt was once thought to be a legend, and it had its own legendary story. The city was a den of iniquity, having grown prideful and complacent due to its wealth. One night, some drunken young men harassed a priest to give last rites to a pig. The priest asked God to send a punishment to the young men, and when the priest left town, a huge storm wiped out the entire city, and it was never seen again. But the legend says that afterward you could hear the sound of the church’s bell ring from the North Sea.
That storm was the Grote Mandrenke, or Saint Marcellus’s flood, of January 1362. It raged across several countries and killed around 30,000 people. It also changed the coastline of Denmark. Rungholt, a port city of around 3,000 people, was wiped out and left underwater.
The first signs of what might be Rungholt were found in 1921 near the islands created by the storm. Archaeologists have been studying relics in the mudflats of the UNESCO Wadden Sea World Heritage Site. Last month, they found the remains of a large church near the island of Südfall. They had already found a large drainage system, dykes, and two smaller churches. This discovery may confirm that the excavation area is indeed, the lost city of Rungholt. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Ralf Roletschek)
Source: neatorama