Vineta (sometimes Wineta) is the name of a legendary city at the southern coast of the Baltic Sea. The legend evolved around traditions about the Medieval emporium called Jumne, Jomsborg, Julin or similar names by the chronicles, and with which Vineta is sometimes identified.
There are several Vineta legends. All of them portray the Vinetans as having an excessive, voluptuous or blasphemous way of life and then being punished in a flood that took the city to the bottom of the Baltic. In some variants of the myth, the city or parts thereof reappear on certain days or can be seen from a boat, making the warning conveyed by the myth more tangible for the audience.
Some variants of the myth have Vineta sunken off Koserow (on the isle of Usedom). The historian Wilhelm Ferdinand Gadebusch from Swinemünde (Świnoujście) made this and other observations the basis for his thesis of Vineta's location. According to Gadebusch, Wolin did not have the deep water port that Vineta must have had, and thus discarded the Wolin thesis (see below). David Chyträus in his 16th century Chronicon Saxoniae had Vineta "beyond the Peene river near the village of Damerow [de]" which was a Vorwerk of Koserow. For Chyträus, Usedom was the land of the Vinetans, while Julin on the neighboring island of Wolin was inhabited by Pomoranians. Since no traces of Slavic settlement have been found on northwest Usedom, this thesis is no longer accepted.
Several maps published between 1633 and 1700 have the sunken "Wineta" east of the island of Ruden northwest of Usedom. About 1700, Bernhard Walther Marperger [de] reported it in the same spot. The origin of this thesis is the All Saints flood of 1306 that reduced Ruden and other small islands from a much larger landmass that prior to the flood had existed between Mönchgut and Usedom.
Rudolf Virchow said: "Vineta is Wollin!" Based on the primary sources outlined above, Adolf Hofmeister [de] in 1931/32 formulated the thesis that Vineta, Jumne, Julin, Jomsborg etc. are all different spellings used for the same place on the site of today's town of Wolin.[1] Beginning in the 1930s, and continued after the annexation of Wolin to Poland after World War II, archaeologists unearthed the remains of a large settlement there. Hofmeister's thesis is the only mainstream thesis regarding the location of Vineta in today's historiography.
A thesis formulated by Goldmann und Wermusch placed Vineta near Barth, pointing to a possibly different course of the Oder in the Middle Ages and a creative reading of the primary sources outlined above.
