Jaromarsburg

The Rani settled Rügen from about the 9th century, probably raising the sanctuary at Cape Arkona then and fortifying it in several stages. Two successive ramparts reached 13 metres, raised again in the 11th century with soil taken from inside the enclosure; defences and temple alike were of wood. Cliffs guarded two sides, the burgwall the third.

After the destruction of Rethra in 1068 the temple inherited its standing as the religious centre of the Slavs of the southern Baltic. It served as an oracle and drew offerings from beyond the Slavs. The settlements that served it are thought to have stood where the fishing villages of Vitt and Putgarten are now; Putgarten means “at the foot of the castle”.

The Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus describes a temple ringed by two enclosures, the outer under a purple roof, with a four-metre statue of Svantovit cut from an oak trunk inside. In its right hand the figure held a drinking horn of various metals; the priest filled it each year with mead, and from what had gone from it over the year foretold the coming harvest. Within its confines, Saxo writes, the priest was not even permitted to breathe, lest he defile it.

A Danish army under Erik II Emune took the temple fortress as early as 1136. The beaten Rani promised to accept Christianity, then broke the agreement once the Danes had sailed. In 1157 a storm wrecked a large Slavic fleet off the Norwegian coast, and Waldemar I used the weakness to open an offensive against Rügen, the Rani stronghold. After raids, ambushes and partial victories he landed at Arkona on 19 May 1168 with his army commander and close friend Bishop Absalon.

The fortress fell after four weeks of siege, when the attackers set a fire at an unwatched point that the defenders could not put out for want of water; the temple was then destroyed and the statue of Svantovit chopped up and burned. The year is not quite settled: Helmold of Bosau states 1168, Saxo gives none, and the papal charter recognising the conquest is dated 4 November at Benevento without a year, and Alexander III was there in both 1168 and 1169.

Tezlaw, until then king of the Rani, and his brother Jaromar submitted to the Danish king at their seat of Charenza. Tezlaw died in 1170 and Jaromar ruled as prince of the Rani until 1218; the burgwall's modern name derives from him, the site having been known in its own day as Arkona. The temple treasure fell to Waldemar, shared with his ally Henry the Lion in 1171; its extensive lands passed to the Church.

Rügen came under the bishop of Lund in 1169, and chapels went up on the old cult places; the first Christian church on the island was built on the ground of the sanctuary itself. In the nearby church of Altenkirchen, begun probably by 1185, the Priest Stone is built in on its side above the foundation course, its sideways setting read as the new faith's mastery over the old. The relief is most likely pre-Christian — perhaps the priest of Svantovit, the only man entitled to handle the god's ornate horn, perhaps the gravestone of Tezlaw, granted the Wittow peninsula after the conquest.

Arkona is the only burgwall in Germany described in detail by contemporaries, and the cliff has been taking it back at 10 to 20 metres a century; the enclosed area is reckoned at a third of what it once was. Carl Schuchhardt made the first recorded investigation in 1921, cutting inward from the rampart and finding traces of building he read as the temple and the statue's stand — an identification later archaeologists doubt and no one can retest, that ground having gone into the sea. His other result held: the cult space around the temple was empty, almost without finds, as Saxo had described.

In 1930 Wilhelm Petzsch examined the rampart and its gate and found, beneath the burnt fighting layer of 1168 and the fighting layer of 1136, a deeper burnt layer he dated to 1000 — for which no significant fighting is documented.

The site entered the GDR monument lists in 1964. In 1981 more than 23 metres of the northern rampart went into the sea, and a cistern at the edge was excavated in 1994. A campaign opened in 2020 under Sebastian Messal of the German Archaeological Institute for the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern heritage office, planned for at least six years on the northern rampart, where rows of stones running with the wall have come up. Visitors have long been barred from the rampart and interior for fear of further collapse, though the Peilturm platform overlooks the ground.