Vineta (sometimesWineta) is the name of a legendary city at the southern coast of theBaltic Sea. The legend evolved around traditions about the Medieval emporium called Jumne,Jomsborg, Julin or similar names by the chronicles, and with which Vineta is sometimes identified.
There are several Vineta legends. All of them portray the Vinetans as having an excessive, voluptuous or blasphemous way of life and then being punished in a flood that took the city to the bottom of the Baltic. In some variants of the myth, the city or parts thereof reappear on certain days or can be seen from a boat, making the warning conveyed by the myth more tangible for the audience.
About 965,Ibrahim ibn Jaqub wrote inArabic letters about this city. The transcription might beWeltaba, which corresponds to modern Polish "Wełtawa" meaning roughly a place among waves.
1075/80,Adam of Bremen wrote about an emporium on an island in theOder estuary, east of his Diocese, where Slavs, Barbarians and Greeks were supposed to live and Saxon merchants stayed for trade.Harald Bluetooth had once found refuge there. The oldest preserved manuscript, from the 11th century, has the spellingvimne oruimne, and the second oldest manuscript, from around 1200, hasuimne andiumne orjumne (there is no distinction between v and u or i and j in the written Latin of that time). More recent copies of the text primarily useJumne; in an early modern print the name is spelledJulinum andJuminem.[1]
Between 1140 and 1159, three vitae ofOtto of Bamberg were written using the nameJulin for the medieval place located at the site of the later town ofWolin.[1]
1163/1168,Helmold of Bosau copied almost word for word the respective sentences written by Adam of Bremen. The oldest preserved handwriting of Helmolds chronicle (ca. 1300) has the place spelleduineta, corrected by the copyist toiuḿta (abbreviation ofiumenta oriumneta). Younger copies useJumneta in the text, yet in the header of the respective chapter all copies useVinneta.[1]
About 1170, the NordicKnytlinga saga reported a siege ofJomsborg by the Dano-Norwegian king Magnus (1043) and a campaign against that place by the Danish kingValdemar I (1170).[1]
About 1190,Saxo Grammaticus reported the same campaign (1170) and Harald Bluetooth's earlier stay there, but called the placeJulin[um].[1]
Some variants of the myth have Vineta sunken offKoserow (on the isle ofUsedom). The historian Wilhelm Ferdinand Gadebusch fromSwinemünde (Świnoujście) made this and other observations the basis for his thesis of Vineta's location. According to Gadebusch, Wolin did not have the deep water port that Vineta must have had, and thus discarded the Wolin thesis (see below).David Chyträus in his 16th centuryChronicon Saxoniae had Vineta "beyond thePeene river near the village ofDamerow [de]" which was aVorwerk of Koserow. For Chyträus, Usedom was the land of the Vinetans, while Julin on the neighboring island ofWolin was inhabited by Pomoranians. Since no traces of Slavic settlement have been found on northwest Usedom, this thesis is no longer accepted.
Several maps published between 1633 and 1700 have the sunken "Wineta" east of the island ofRuden northwest ofUsedom. About 1700,Bernhard Walther Marperger [de] reported it in the same spot. The origin of this thesis is theAll Saints flood of 1306 that reduced Ruden and other small islands from a much larger landmass that prior to the flood had existed betweenMönchgut and Usedom.
Rudolf Virchow said: "Vineta is Wollin!" Based on the primary sources outlined above,Adolf Hofmeister [de] in 1931/32 formulated the thesis that Vineta, Jumne, Julin, Jomsborg etc. are all different spellings used for the same place on the site of today's town of Wolin.[1] Beginning in the 1930s, and continued after the annexation of Wolin toPoland afterWorld War II, archaeologists unearthed the remains of a large settlement there. Hofmeister's thesis is the only mainstream thesis regarding the location of Vineta in today's historiography.
A thesis formulated by Goldmann und Wermusch placed Vineta nearBarth, pointing to a possibly different course of the Oder in the Middle Ages and a creative reading of the primary sources outlined above.
InHeidelberg there is a student fraternity "Vineta" since 1879.
In Schleswig-Holstein there is a sports club named TSV Vineta Audorf.
In Schleswig Holstein (Busdorf) there is a club called Disco-Vineta.
InEuropa-ParkRust (Baden), in the themed land 'Scandinavia' there was an attraction 'Sunken city "Vineta"'. It was destroyed in a fire in 2018 and may never be rebuilt.
^abcdefSchmidt, Roderich: Das historische Pommern. Personen, Orte, Ereignisse (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Pommern, Reihe V, Forschungen Bd. 41), Köln / Weimar 2007, S. 70–72.
Adolf Hofmeister [de]: "Vineta," die quellenkritische Lösung eines vielberufenen Problems, in Forschungen und Fortschritte, vol. 8 (1932), pp. 341–343.
