Hiddensee

Hiddensee is about seventeen kilometres long and rarely more than two wide, with a hill of glacial moraine at the northern end and a long sand spit running south. Private cars are banned; movement is by bicycle, horse cart and foot. In the 1870s storms washed gold jewellery out of the dunes near Neuendorf, sixteen pieces of tenth-century Scandinavian work in filigree and granulation, one of the most important Viking gold finds in the Baltic; the originals are in Stralsund. Gerhart Hauptmann, the playwright, spent summers on the island for decades and is buried there. Sea buckthorn grows across the dunes.

History

The island was first settled in the Middle and Late Stone Age, and after much of the Germanic population left the southern Baltic in the 6th century AD the Slavic Rani took it; the Hiddensee treasure shows it lay within the Vikings' sphere in the 9th/10th century, and after King Waldemar I of Denmark defeated the Rani in 1168 it came under Danish rule. On 13 April 1296 Prince Wizlaw II of Rügen gave the island to Neuenkamp Abbey, which founded a Cistercian monastery here, and between 1302 and 1306 the Gellen church, a small beacon and the first harbour were built in the south; the island church was consecrated in 1332, the monastery was dissolved in the Reformation in 1536, and in 1628, in the Thirty Years' War, soldiers burned the oak forest on the Dornbusch, leaving an ash layer still visible by the road near the lighthouse (Wikipedia, Hiddensee).

What's there

• The car-free island - transport by bicycle, horse cart and foot only.
• The gold hoard story - Viking jewellery washed from the dunes in the 1870s.
• The Dornbusch lighthouse - a tower on the moraine hill at the north end.
• The Hauptmann house - the playwright's summer home and grave.

When to go

May to September; ferries run in season with a reduced winter service and are cancelled in storms. The island is quiet and largely closed out of season.

What to expect

No cars means everything is carried or cycled. The gold is displayed in Stralsund, not on the island. Ferries stop in bad weather.

Nearby

Rügen lies east; Stralsund is on the mainland.