I sold the cloak clasp the Icelanders sent me and bought herring; I also exchanged my arrows for herring on the occasion of the crop failure.
Vis Eyvind. M. I. Steblin-Kamensky. Works on philology. SPb.: Publishing house of SPbSU, 2003
Museums of the world. And it so happened that back in 1976, the Archaeological Trust of the British city of York, headed by director Peter Ediman, began excavating a small part of the ancient city, the territory of which had been previously cleared for rebuilding. It took five years to complete this excavation - the most thorough excavation ever carried out within the city. As a result, valuable finds were discovered, the age of which was a thousand years or more, on the basis of which one of the most interesting museums in Great Britain, the Jorvik Viking Center, was subsequently created.
The Vikings called the current city of York Jorvik. The Viking Center is built underneath its modern shopping center. The museum recreates a living picture of York from the 10th century. The central part of the museum is a life-size reconstruction of an ancient city street with five thatched houses.
This quarter was, however, only a small part of a thriving ancient Viking city. Then York was the second largest British city after London, the center of agriculture and a river port, from which trade was carried out with the most distant possessions of the Vikings: from Scandinavia to the Bosphorus. Among the finds found are Arabic coins, silk, apparently made in Byzantium, a shell from the Middle East. During the excavations, stamps for minting coins were also found, which indicates that Jorvik had its own mint. All the exhibits found during the excavations were subjected to the most thorough analysis, so that the employees of the Archaeological Trust can explain everything, and the smallest details of the Viking street they recreated.
Visitors to the exhibition drive through it in … special cars that move on a magnetic tape. They trace the recreated history of York backwards, from the 19th century to the Norman conquest of 1066, and then to the Viking Age. Unfortunately, this walk is not available to everyone today, but let's visit this museum, so to speak, virtually, imagining everything that it can show us …
And here we are at the museum. Time seemed to have stopped, and not just stopped, but stopped at a very specific date. This is October 28, 948, and we are on Coppergate Street - the street of coopers and cup makers. Let's stop for a minute and watch what is happening in this street market towards the end of the day. Here is a bone carver, Torfastur, trying to sell the remaining combs and buckles from the antlers. Here is an apprentice wood turner, Lodin, heading for his machine - this tool skillfully restored on the basis of archaeological finds and is an exact copy of the machine on which the ancient craftsmen, who gave the name to Coppergate Street, worked. Here is a tannery: in it, an old, obese Blufotr (which means Blue Foot) cannot find shoes that would fit on his gout-disfigured feet. Although we know that on Coppergate Street, shoes and boots of various styles were made. But, apparently, he was stingy for new clothes …
All these people came to life thanks to the skill of the sculptor Graham Ibbsen, who managed to take a kind of snapshot of all these inhabitants of the ancient city, frozen by his efforts in movement. Here is a counter with metal products, and next to it stands the king's courtier, nicknamed the Bloody Ax - the famous Norwegian nobleman Arinbjorn. In general, everything here is very, very natural, everything and everyone moves, even a rat eating a piece of fish looks like a living thing!
The time of the busiest trade is already behind us, but it is still noisy on the street: we hear voices that are heard from all sides. This is done using a complex audio device with 64 audio tracks. Therefore, we can hear the authentic sounds of an ancient Viking street: neighbors gossip, children play, artisans sing at work, old people tell stories. For six months, Christine Fell, a professor at the University of Nottingham, taught a group of children and adults in a village in North Yorkshire in the Viking language - Old Norse. A group of specialists even visited Iceland and made a number of sound recordings there, because the Icelandic language of all modern Scandinavian languages is the closest to Old Norse.
Now we will move on to the embankment of the Foss River. On both its banks - houses, workshops, warehouses and courtyards. Some buildings are half-buried in the ground: some are built of oak logs and planks, others, older, are made of twigs and plastered with clay. There are one-story houses, there are houses with attics and even two-story ones.
This is a very lively place: turners grind wood, jewelers make brooches, rings and pendants from jet and amber, women spin, weave, and dye fabrics. In the distance, a coin maker mints a bargaining chip.
Here we will turn off our route and enter one of the houses. Here life is centered around the hearth: near it they eat, sleep, cook, play, work at the loom. The walls are made of twigs, but inside it is very cozy, although, perhaps, sometimes a little cramped … If you go out into the backyard, then all sorts of smells hit your nose. If you smell it, you can count up to 12 different odors that are specially created by a company that usually produces products for their destruction. Smells like moldy apples, rotten fish and something worse. The smells actually come from the pills placed in special vessels; the tablets are warmed up all the time and changed daily. Here are the pigs digging in the pen, nearby are pits with garbage and another pit that replaces the latrine.
And now we are by the river. A Norwegian cargo ship was pulled ashore. His team unloads rolls of leather, furs, barrels of herring and takes it all to warehouses. The port of Jorvik is a transshipment point for trade in the North Sea basin, where products are brought here from all cities of Northern Europe.
The smaller boat is a replica of an ancient Viking four-oared boat, the fairing, which was made at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. The large freighter is a replica of one of five Viking ships found at the bottom of the Roskilde fjord in Denmark. It was equipped under the guidance of the recognized authority on Viking shipbuilding and sailing, Dr. Alan Binza of the University of Hull. The ships' sails were sewn from linen and reinforced with jute and leather - made for the museum by Alf Redman, a sailmaker based in Whitby, North Yorkshire.
On the deck of the ship, sailors are mending the nets that were brought here from the Gambia, no matter how hard it is to believe. The organizer of the museum, Phoebe McLeod, searched England for natural fiber nets, and it was only thanks to a television program about the Gambia that she managed to find exactly what she needed.
Sailors always tell stories, and the guys always love to listen to them. Here is a little boy, mouth open, listening to the stories of his father and grandfather. The boy's name is Toki, this name was chosen for him by Yorkshire guys who took part in a special competition: "What was the name of the boy?"
And now it's time to turn the time machine again: ancient Jorvik goes to sleep, and you and I are transported to 1979, to the excavation site that took place here from 1976 to 1981. Here, six meters below the surface, we see a picture of archaeological excavations even before the establishment of the Jorvik Viking Center in their place.
We see how, with the help of special steel shields, the walls of the excavation were strengthened, as well as a small cabin in which archaeologists and workers drank tea during a break. We see the excavated remains of sheds, houses and workshops exactly in the form in which they appeared before the eyes of archaeologists after a thousand-year burial under the ground. Based on this irrefutable evidence, archaeologists in York have just recreated the ancient Coppergate Street as it was during the Viking Age.
The boards and logs found during the excavations were in a solution of polyethylene glycol and wax for several months - thus they managed to be preserved and put back in the places from where they were dug. In Jorvik this way we can see the best wooden buildings of the Viking Age in Europe.
From the excavation site, we will head to the room where the individual finds are kept. The premise is the basement of a candy factory that was once located on Coppergate Street. During the excavations, more than 35 thousand finds were discovered - all of them had to be washed, dried, marked, packed and sent for research and identification - everything from coins and jewelry to fleas, beetles and their eggs. And all this can be seen here …
However, our journey through time ended there. We managed to see the real past, recreated with the help of a beautiful illusion, the excavations themselves and all the painstaking work associated with them, and as a result, an amazing reconstruction of the long-buried past, which was discovered with the help of a shovel of archaeologists.
P. S. The author and the administration of the site "Voennoye Obozreniye" thank the directorate of the Center for the opportunity to use its photographs.
