Featured German or... Dutch?

07:27 That bracelet has me wondering. It's UK Roadshow from the 1990s, but jewelry jockeys on these shows aren't always too bright.

 

It is German, from the Wadden Sea islands of East Friesland. So along the strip of German coast that goes from the Dutch border to the Danish border.
They make some of the most beautiful jewellery in Germany.

The Wadden Sea is the largest intertidal sea in the world, it lies on the north coast of the Netherlands, the northwest coast of Germany and the west coast of Denmark. It is a World Heritage Site.
In the Wadden Sea are some of the most amazing islands in the world, some are flooded at high tide, with farms sitting high and dry on top of man made mounds. Other islands were prominent in both the Baltic trade and the East India trade.
Some of the islands were filthy rich during the heyday of the Medieval Hanseatic League, and the women were almost covered in gold jewellery. I guess that is when the exquisite silver and goldsmithing tradition began.

Those rich days have gone, but the islands are still beautiful, with historic towns and villages and mesmerizing land- and seascapes and wildlife.

If you ever have a chance to watch the Dutch documentary film "Silence of the Tides" by Pieter-Rim de Kroon, do watch.
Just a warning, it is not completely silent. But there is no narrator, just impressions of life in the Wadden Sea and on the islands and coast. Keep an eye out for the German postman, quite a character.

 

https://silenceofthetides.com/

(Can you tell I love the Wadden Sea?)

 

Makes sense why they looked Dutch to me, then. All y'all were working together and I bet goldsmiths moved around early and often.

 

That's a beautiful,almost mystical coast.
I beleive in 2002 they unearthed a 700 year old Hanseatic ship (Cog) under a street in Estonia.
Here's a purse recovered from a shipwreck in the Wadden Sea-

 

Would not surprise me one bit.

 

Very likely, Talinn was one of the Hansa towns, it was called Reval at the time.
Several cogs or kogges have been unearthed in the Netherlands as well, and one reconstruction was made, the 'Kamper kogge', the pride of the town of Kampen.
Kampen and the other Dutch Hansa towns are worth a visit anyway, for those of you brave enough to venture outside Holland.

This is the Kamper kogge:



And below is a map of the Hansa towns and trade routes, so you get an idea what northern Europe got up to in the Middle Ages.
"Hanze" is Dutch for Hansa.



Not all Dutch Hansa towns are on the map, they couldn't all fit in the cluster of dots (our country is too small). The Netherlands is the bit of land across the Channel from London.
London and Bergen (Norway) are included, but that is where the Hansa had trading agencies, those are not actual Hansa towns. The Hansa trading agency near London was called Stalhof (Steelyard), which is why that name is next to London on the map.

 

Danzig and Konigsberg have changed names since - Gdansk and Kaliningrad.

 

And Breslau is Wroclaw now, and Krakau is Kraków.
Reval-Talinn has already been mentioned, but I'm sure there are a few others too.

 

I knew the other twp because some of my ancestors came from the area, and Kaliningrad was a bone of contention for a long time.

 

And it still is.
Ideally it should be neither Königsberg nor Kaliningrad, but a native Prussian name. Kaliningrad is in the original Prussia, which the German Prussia is named after.
Later it came to be called Old Prussia, and then East Prussia.The Old Prussian language was a Baltic language.

My MIL's European forefather came from Königsberg. He was one of many people from the Baltic who went to work for the VOC, the Dutch East India Company.
The link between the Netherlands and the Baltic region at the time was a result of the historic Hanseatic connection.

 

That might be true, but good luck finding in anyone who still knows Old Prussian.

 

True, it has had such a long history under the German Knights that it became culturally German. And now it is part of Russia.
The Prussian language was closely related to Lithuanian.

 

Which I don't read, although it feels like I should sometimes. At least once I've seen some and "What is this? I ought to understand at least what language it is...duh Lithuanian. You don't read that..." Probably why the town is still using a Russian name.

 

I regularly think people on Dutch TV are speaking Lithuanian, but that is probably my brain interfering as usual.

That could be due to the usual Russian imperialism.

Many European placenames originated in Roman times, or even before. The Latin, Celtic, old Germanic etc names were modified over time to suit later language developments.
For instance, the Romanised Celtic name Lugdunum became London in England, Leiden in the Netherlands, and Lyon in France. All three were called Lugdunum in Roman times (lack of imagination).
A similar adaptation could be done with an Old Prussian name. But not while it is still Russian. Mind you, I think the city of Königsberg was founded by the German Knights Order.

 

If it's written in Dutch I can usually hammer something out of it by bashing my primitive German into it. (was singing in German in church this morning - I still have the world's worst time singing Stille Nacht in English. Silent Night that is.) Lithuanian not so much.

Konigsburg was taken over by some invading Germans (possibly including an ancestor or two of mine) in the 1300s if memory serves. Which it often doesn't. No doubt there was already some sort of walled town for them to invade.

 

To me they are two entirely different songs. I prefer the beautifully gentle wording of the original Austrian (German) version.

Only if you have knights of the German Order among your ancestors.

I searched some more, and found the original name of Königsberg: Twangste, first recorded in the tenth century.
Twangste was a walled fortress, with a small trading village next to it. Trade was with the Vikings (Danish and Russian) and later the Hansa.

 

Sorry to jump in the discussion (very interesting and informative, as usual here), just to remind that Koeningsberg was given as a trophy to Stalin by his comrades USA and UK. It has never been Russian before that (as far as my historical knowledge suggests), and was populated with Germans who were forcibly expelled and moved to Siberia by Stalin shortly after the war. Then it was renamed after the Soviet nomenclaturchik Michail Kalinin and made an important port of the Russian nuclear navy. And populated with over a million ethnic Russians.

I have read that Khrushchov offered it to Lithuania in the 1950s (when he gave Crimea to Ukraine) but the then communist ruler of Lithuania Antanas Sniečkus refused to take it because of fears of the 1 Million Russians who would automatically become Lithuanian citizens and will shift significantly the ethnic balance with all the consequences. Which proves that some Communist leaders had brains.

 

...which was probably Stalin's goal, of course.

Oddly, I learned the Austrian words at university. One of the few useful language classes I had there was German-language music. As for Teutonic knight ancestors... I had ancestors from eastern Prussia, etc and you never can tell!

Twangste ... given the choice, I bet the locals stick with Kaliningrad.(LOL)

 

Jump in as much and often as you like, your contribution is always valuable.

When someone's country is given to someone else by third parties it always ends in trouble. We see the sad result on the news every day.

You're right, historically it had nothing to do with Russia, except trade connections. It had the same trade connections with most of northern Europe.

Yes, one of several mass deportations as part of the Russification of non-Russian countries and regions. The population was a German-Old Prussian mix, who spoke high-German and were culturally German.

Interesting. Lithuania currently has difficulty with its current Russian minority, imagine what it would have been like if it had 1 million more.

The Twangste/Königsberg/Kaliningrad situation is a problem though, given its location and the Russian military activities. It will remain a problem as long as Russia creates problems.