Serpin

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Serpin
The Serpin: View to the east from the passage between the two parts of the southern wall section, 2015

The Serpin: View to the east from the passage between the two parts of the southern wall section, 2015

Alternative name (s): Seppin, Sappin
Creation time : Bronze age
Castle type : Low - / escape castle
Conservation status: Wall remains
Geographical location 54 ° 22 '2 "  N , 13 ° 26' 17.8"  E Coordinates: 54 ° 22 '2 "  N , 13 ° 26' 17.8"  E
Serpin (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania)
Serpin

The Serpin is a rampart in the wooded area of ​​the Pastitz Forest near Ketelshagen, northwest of Putbus on the island of Rügen .

Location and description

Approximately 1000 meters northeast of Ketelshagen in the Pastitzer Forest there is a meadow called Serpin, Seppin or Sappin. At the western edge of this meadow are the remains of a rampart (coordinates 54.367231N | 13.438286O). Up until the middle of the 19th century there was a fish-rich lake on the site of the meadow, which was drained in 1848. For the first time, von Hagenow mentions the facility as a “large rampart near Röwenhagen on the Sappin or Serpin swamp”, but does not describe it in detail. The village of Röwenhagen has since died. The word Serpin is obviously of Slavic origin and goes back either to the carp fish Zope or the marshland , the swamp floor . The origin of the word " Froschsee " is also possible. Another derivation from Wendish for the sickle is viewed by Alfred Haas as rather inaccurate. From the western bank of the former lake, the wall extends in a semicircle into the forest. At the time the lake was drained, the height of the wall was around 3 to 4 meters. The outer slope of the rampart was somewhat steeper and higher than the slope on the inside. Starting in 1846, all stones were broken out of the northern part of the wall and used for the construction of the Bergen - Altefähr highway . The removal and the subsequent forestry use lead to the continuous removal of the wall. This part is about 200 meters long, curved in a sickle shape and open to the east. Its height is approx. 1.5 - 2 meters. Both on the inner and outer side, the wall does not have a steep, but rather a flattened appearance. In the southern part, numerous stones are used for the foundations of the Ketelshagen forester's house between 1859 and 1860. Nevertheless, this part of the wall has been better preserved in its appearance. The steep rampart on the western side is about 90 meters long and, like the northern part, is also sickle-shaped, but with the open side curved to the west. There is a water hole to the west of the wall. The height of the system is between 2 and 5 meters. To the east, this wall section is followed by three more small, elongated stone mounds. The area of ​​approximately 1.7 hectares enclosed by the wall is a peninsula-shaped, flat headland protruding into the former lake .

and display information about the image
Serpin castle wall: Serpin (I), Mes Tischblatt 374 (detail), 1: 25000, description: Putbus, photo 1885, published 1887, Berlin: Reichsamt für Landesaufnahme, 1886

history

The wall could not be determined so far, but is interpreted by Schmidt as a Slavic or early medieval low - or refuge castle . There are more than 100 other archaeological monuments in the Pastitz forest . In addition to evidence of arable farming , data from the pollen analysis indicate a continuity from Neolithic to Bronze Age settlement, which increased in the Bronze Age and reached a low point in the course of the migration of peoples . In the Middle Ages , the settlement indicator rose again in the course of the Slavic settlement. Only presumably late Slavic or modern ceramic shards come from one settlement. During field inspections between 2002 and 2006, soil monuments from the late Middle Neolithic to the Bronze Age are mapped. In addition to a large number of large stone and hill graves, there are also 6 small bowl stones between the Postmoor and Mühlbach headwaters, about 1 - 2 kilometers northeast of the Serpin in the area of ​​the Pastitz Forest. The concentration of soil monuments in the named area could, as with the ramparts in the Stubnitz (the Schlossberg and the Hengst ) and the Granitz (the Schanzenberg ), indicate a correspondingly higher age of the ramparts of the Serpins.

  • The Serpin: View to the north over the northern part of the rampart, which is much less preserved, 2015

  • The Serpin: looking south to the northern end of the north wall, 2015

Popular tradition

There is plenty of information about the old fortifications on the Serpin. There is a widespread legend that a large, splendid castle, the “Sappin” castle, stood on the Sappin. But the same thing suddenly sank into the earth in one night without a trace of it ever being visible again. Nobody can say exactly why the castle has sunk; only one thing is certain, that the malice of the castle residents was to blame.

A poor, honest peasant needed money and wondered and thought where he could borrow something; while he drove past the Serpin castle, and a friendly man came up to him and asked him why he was so worried and whether he could not help him. Then the farmer complained of his need, the stranger made him wait a moment and immediately afterwards brought a whole bushel of gold, which he gave to the farmer on condition that he repay it within a certain period of time. At first the farmer thought he had something to do with evil, but the man soon calmed him down and said: "If you come here on the day of payment, just call for Balder von Serpin!" The money brought the farmer a lot of luck and he gratefully appeared on the specific payment date and called: "Balder von Serpin get Di Din money." Alone in vain, it did not appear anywhere until finally a voice called out: "Balder is not mier, Balder is ford, keep Din money."

A fisherman from Stralsund once wanted to fish on the Sappiner See. When he got to the lake, his boat and all the fishing tackle had disappeared. He looked for it, and as he looked around, he saw the boat and fishing tackle high up in an oak tree . Then he said: “Wake up olle Düwel raise that dahn?”, A voice answered: “Do not raise olle Düwel dahn; dat heww ick un min Broder dahn! ”. Then the fisherman cut down the oak and brought the boat back to the lake. No sooner had it happened than the boat, as if driven by invisible force, shot over to the other bank.

Next to the stone wall is a deep moor , and also a high stone on which the figure of a knight is said to have been roughly hewn. It is dark in color; but on its surface there appear many raised, protruding, white, partly wider, partly narrower stripes. It is probably quartz veins that remained unweathered, while the rest of the darker surface of the stone gradually diminished through weathering. Another stone nearby seems to have split halfway as if with one blow. The folk legend reports that this blow was carried out as a divine judgment by a greedy knight who wanted to shorten his brother's rightful inheritance on land.

The legend also says that Serpin once had a castle and that a brotherly quarrel raged on it, during which a false oath was sworn; then the castle had been thrown into the adjoining moor by the vengeance of heaven, but sometimes the castle with its tower still protruded from the swamp. Others say that the pagan lady in the castle disdained the love of a Christian knight and the figures of the lady and the castle warden still sometimes appeared there, haunted .

At the time when Christianity was victorious over dark paganism on Rügen, a castle that was feared far and wide stood on the Seppin, because the lords of the castle had long made themselves terrible through robbery and murder in the whole area. The owner at the time was also a bad guy, graying in sins, and he was very angry when he received the message that the youngest son of Prince Ratze von Rügen, the noble Stoislaff vou Putbus, who was once his only one, also cleaned Son had killed in a duel, wanted to build a castle near him. When the messenger from Stoislaff came, bringing him his master's greeting and offering him good neighbors, he got so angry that he cursed his castle with everything that was in it and on it into the deepest abyss of the earth. Shy and fearful, the messenger began his retreat so quickly that he forgot the gloves he had put on the chair, and when he rode back, thinking about it on the way, he found the still billowing swamp instead of the castle and on the edge of it the chair with his gloves. As soon as he had taken it, the chair sank in front of his eyes. Even now a little gray man wanders every night from the Seppin to the Putbusser Schlosse to get annoyed at the beautiful and solid building. He is making his way straight through the village of Neu- Güstelitz . When, about 20 years ago, the carpenter Müller was building a house for him on his sidewalk, he was shameful about it and chased him out of bed almost every night until he finally got used to it. If a pure bachelor, born on St. John's Night, enters the moor on St. John's night, he will find a rope there, and if he has enough courage, he can pull the whole castle up again. Once the castle was on the verge of being redeemed, because a horse boy belonging to the bricklayer Plitz stumbled over a rope on Midsummer night when he happened to walk on the moor. But when he picked up the rope, a voice called to him: “Pull on!” So ​​he pulled and pulled the point of the castle up out of the bog. But he was so shocked that he let go of the rope, and the castle immediately sank into the depths again.

When the French troops marched on Rügen in 1807 , a French officer in Garz is said to have demanded that half a company be relocated to Serpin Castle and when Mayor Oom declared that such a castle was unknown to him, he pulled out an old card, on which the Serpin castle was recorded. Some citizens of Garz remembered the old, ghostly Walles Serpin, and half the company that had been destined there was now sent to Putbus.

As Alfred Haas sums up, the folk tale was very busy to decorate the Serpin ramparts. From this wealth of legends, he sees the probability that the castle wall played an important role in prehistoric times. The legends go back to the early history of the island and the use of the castle. In the story of “Balder von Serpin”, Haas finally wants to recognize a treasure-guarding dwarf or earth spirit of paganism - cf. also Kuhn. Concerning the similarities in the folk tale, about the sunken castle, of Serpin, of the Black Lake in the Granitz and of the Herthasee on Jasmund , as well as the saga of the fishing boat in the tree of Serpin and the Herthasee, Haas puts forward the assumption that these together with other, similar legends refer to prehistoric sanctuaries or places of worship, which are reinforced by the Baldersage.

literature

  • Nils Petzholdt: Rügen's pre-Slavic castle complexes In: Pomerania. Journal of Culture and History. Issue 1/2016, ISSN  0032-4167 , pp. 4–13. or Nils Petzholdt: Rügen's vorwendische Wehranlagen In: Stralsund booklets for history, culture and everyday life, Stralsund 2016, ISBN 978-3-95872-039-8 , pp. 97-107.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Friedrich von Hagenow : von Hagenow's map of Rügen, in: Neue Pommersche Provinzblätter, Volume 3, edited by Ludwig Giesebrecht and Johann Christian Ludwig Haken , Stettin 1828, p. 319
  2. ^ Oskar Beyersdorff , Slavic Stripes, in: Baltic Studies AF 33, Stettin 1883, p. 59
  3. ↑ a b c Fourth and Twentieth Annual Report of the Society for Pomeranian History and Antiquity, in: Baltic Studies AF 14, Issue 1, Stettin 1850, pp. 127–128
  4. ^ A b Alfred Haas : Contributions to the knowledge of the Rügen castle walls, in: Baltic Studies NF 14, Stettin 1910, pp. 63–67
  5. ↑ a b Markus Sommer-Scheffler, Volker Rösing: Wages of Perseverance - The "forgotten" soil monuments in the Pastitz Forest, district of Rügen, in: Archäologische Entdeckungen in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Schwerin 2009, pp. 87-88
  6. ↑ Ingrid Schmidt, Hünengrab and Sacrificial Stone, Rostock 2001, p. 75
  7. ^ Archaeological monuments of the island of Rügen - witnesses of history in the landscape ( http://www.ruegen-inselinfo.de/sites/default/files/downloads/bodendenkmale.pdf ), ed. from Rügen District, Main and School Administration Office, SB EU Projects / Partnerships, Billrothstrasse 5, 18528 Bergen auf Rügen, accessed on June 3, 2015
  8. ↑ Elsbeth Lange , Lebrecht Jeschke and Hans Dieter Knapp: Ralswiek and Rügen, Landscape Development and Settlement History of the Baltic Sea Island, Part I - The Landscape History of the Island of Rügen since the Late Glacial, in Writings on Prehistory and Early History, Volume 38, Berlin 1986, p. 116 -117
  9. ↑ Heike Riemann, Fred Ruchhöft , Cornelia Willich: Rügen im Mittelalter, Stuttgart 2011, p. 181
  10. ^ Alfred Haas : Rügensche Sagen und Märchen, 3rd edition, Stettin 1903, No. 140, p. 129
  11. ↑ Adalbert Kuhn : , customs and other tales Westphalia and some from, especially the adjacent areas of northern Germany 1-2. Volume 1, Leipzig 1859, No. 399, pp. 358-359
  12. ^ A b Alfred Haas : Castle walls and barrows on the island of Rügen in the folk tale, Stettin 1925, p. 34
  13. ↑ Sundine: entertainment sheet for New Western Pomerania and Rügen, Volume 15, Stralsund 1841, p. 231
  14. ↑ Adalbert Kuhn : , customs and other tales Westphalia and some from, especially the adjacent areas of northern Germany 1-2. Volume 1, Leipzig 1859, No. 399, pp. 358-359, cf. No. 269 pp. 234-235
  15. ^ Alfred Haas : The Granitz on Rügen, in: Baltic Studies NF 20, Stettin 1917, pp. 48–51