Bant (island)

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Bant Island on Typus Frisiae Orientalis from 1596

Bant was the name of an island off the coast of East Frisia in the Kopersand-Itzendorfplate area between the Leybucht and the island of Juist . Only a sandbank is left of the island today. In contrast to today's East Frisian Islands , which were formed around 2000 years ago as so-called alluvial islands from a beach wall located between the tidal flats and the open sea, Bant was a marsh island similar to the Halligen of North Frisia .

The island was inhabited until the end of the 16th century. There were several salt works . There, table salt was extracted from the ashes of the sea peat, which was extracted on the island . In the middle of the 18th century, the city of Emden set up two sea marks, the "Emder Kapen", to secure the passage of the Westerbalje . As a result of the salt peat mining, Bant was exposed to increasing erosion . The flood-free part of the island shrank from around 76 to 2.5 hectares in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries  . Originally, however, the island may have been significantly larger, and perhaps it even reached as far as today's Borkum Reef . In 1780 the island was completely flooded.

swell

The oldest mention of the island can be found in the biography of St. Liudger , who traveled to western East Friesland at the end of the 8th century. The island is named as one of the six districts of its mission district.

At the end of the 17th century , the private scholar Menso Alting , who came from Groningen , believed that Bant was the remains of a large island that once stretched from Borkum in the west to Norderney in the east. He also equated it with the island of Burchana mentioned by Pliny and Strabo . Bant would have been around 45 kilometers long and up to 25 kilometers wide. Lang suspected that the island also migrated to the east before modern times, and was therefore much more northwest than it is today; For comparison: Wangerooge has migrated around three kilometers to the east in the last 400 years despite more modern coastal protection - half its own length. The large island is said to have broken up in one of the great medieval storm surges. The current channel of the Osterems was not formed until the High Middle Ages, as Adam von Bremen confirmed a connection between the islands for the year 1000, but in 1398 the names Juist , Osterende (later part of the as yet non-existent Norderney) and Borkum appear separately from each other. The All Saints Flood of 1170 and the Grote Mandränke of 1362 fall during this period .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl-Heinz Sindowski: Geological development of East Friesland. - J. Ohling, Ed .: Ostfriesland im Schutz des Deiches, Vol. I. Pewsum 1969, pp. 33–35.
  2. ↑ Norbert Fiks: A small island, shaved away from the sea. , In: Ostfriesen-Zeitung , October 8, 2019, p. 12.
  3. ^ Arend W. Lang : Small map history of East Friesland. 4th-6th Thousand. Norden 1989, p. 57.
  4. ↑ Arend W. Lang: The Juister Watt. Writings of the economic society for the study of Lower Saxony. New series, vol. 57.Bremen-Hörn 1955, p. 39.
  5. ↑ Georg Heinrich Pertz (Ed.): Altfridi vita S. Liudgeri episcopi Mimigardefordensis. - Scriptores rerum Sangallensium. Annales, chronica et historiae aevi Saxonici. Hanover 1829, p. 410.
  6. ↑ Menso Alting: Descriptio agri Batavii et Frisii sive notitia Germaniae inferioris. Amsterdam 1697.
  7. ↑ Lang, p. 32

Coordinates: 53 ° 34 ′ 48 ″  N , 6 ° 59 ′ 24 ″  E