Reric

• 1. Introduction

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  Reric was a thriving port town on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea, gone before most of its inhabitants could have imagined it. Founded probably in 735, it drew merchants, craftspeople, and traders from across northern Europe into a single, busy settlement. Then, in 808, a Danish king named Gudfred arrived and dismantled it, taking the merchants with him to a rival port. What happened to Reric before that moment, and what its ruins tell us now, opens a window onto a world where Slavic and Scandinavian communities built something genuinely new together. The questions worth asking are not just who destroyed it, but who built it, what they made there, and why its exact location remained a mystery for so many centuries.

• 2. Origins and Setting

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  The Obodrite tribe began settling the region shortly before 735, and Reric grew up in the wake of that migration. It sat near what is now Wismar, in the present-day German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, on the eastern shore of the Bay of Wismar. From the start it was a deep water port with a planned layout, which sets it apart from the unplanned, organic settlements that dotted the surrounding landscape.

  Early on, the settlement occupied ground to the north of where it would eventually stand. Around the 760s, the community shifted the site gradually southward, and the original northern area was converted into a cemetery. That kind of deliberate replanning suggests a population with enough cohesion and continuity to reorganize their own town. Within a ten kilometer radius of the settlement, the remains of Slavic open settlements have been found, and the nearby fortified strongholds of Mecklenburg and Ilow were, like Reric, founded in the early 8th century, making them among the earliest Slavic settlements near the Baltic coast.

  At the turn of the 9th century, Reric's citizens entered into an alliance with Charlemagne. He used the port as part of a strategic trade route designed to bypass areas controlled by the Saxons and Danes. That alliance would ultimately draw Reric into a much larger conflict.

• 3. What the Diggers Found

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  Excavations between 1995 and 1999, led by the University of Kiel and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern's State Department for Archaeology, uncovered roughly 20 hectares of the site near Groß Strömkendorf. The settlement stretched 500 meters along the coast and covered a surface of at least 20 hectares. Its buildings resembled the sunken floor structures known from West Stow in England.

  The dominant pottery type was the Sukow type, associated with West Slavs during the 8th century. The Feldberg type, which succeeded it, was present in considerably lower numbers. Imported pottery from western countries was only scarcely represented, which suggests the community was not heavily dependent on western trade networks for everyday goods.

  Norwegian schist whetstones turned up in hoards, hinting at connections to Scandinavia. Evidence of textile work, iron working, and bronze working was also found, along with unfinished products and discarded fragments pointing to the local production of items made of glass, metals including iron, amber, and horn. Crucially, no major industrial evidence appeared, indicating that production was likely kept at a scale suited for local use rather than export. The most recent dateable wood found at the site comes from the year 811, and the way it was found suggests the settlement ceased to exist not long after that date.

• 4. Gudfred's Destruction

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  The Royal Frankish Annals, known in Latin as the Annales regni Francorum, record what happened in 808. Danish king Gudfred, also written as Godofrid or Gøttrik, had collected tribute from Reric for years before that date. Then he destroyed the emporium and, as the annals put it, took with him "the merchants hereof," resettling them in Hedeby, also called Haithabu or Sliasthorp, an emporium closer to Denmark.

  Gudfred's move was not simply a raid. It was a calculated act in the ongoing war between Denmark and Charlemagne's Frankish Empire, in which the Franks had allied with the Obodrites. By seizing Reric's merchant community and transplanting it to Hedeby, Gudfred redirected the trade flows that Charlemagne had been cultivating through the port. The destruction may not have been total, however. An Obodrite duke named Drazko is recorded as being murdered at Reric the following year, in 809, which implies some form of activity continued at the site for a time.

  The archaeological finds align precisely with this written record. The latest dateable well-woods recovered from Reric come from the years 806, 809, and 811, matching the annals' account almost year by year.

• 5. The Long Search for Reric

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  Scholars argued for centuries about where Reric had actually stood. Older proposals placed it at Oldenburg, Lübeck, Mecklenburg Castle, and Alt-Gaarz, a settlement that was renamed Rerik in 1938. None of those candidates held up under scrutiny.

  Since the 1990s, the consensus has shifted firmly to Groß Strömkendorf. The case rests on the excavation results from the University of Kiel and the state archaeology department, which showed that the site's foundation and destruction dates match the historical record for Reric. That alignment, combined with the physical evidence of a deep water port with a planned layout in exactly the right geographic position, made the identification persuasive.

  One intriguing thread connects the site to medieval literature: the alternative name "Reregi" was used by the chroniclers Adam of Bremen and Helmold of Bosau as a name for the Obodrites themselves. Scholars now read that name as probably a rendering of "Reric," meaning the place was so central to Obodrite identity that it gave them a name in the eyes of outside observers. Whether that reading holds, the settlement near Groß Strömkendorf remains the strongest candidate, and future excavations beyond the 20 hectares already studied may yet yield the definitive answer.