The Goths in Poland – where did they come from and when did they leave?

Abstract

Recent archaeological discoveries and reinterpretations of written sources supported by the concepts of historical anthropology allow the creation of a new picture about the Goths. Most of the archaeologists studying the cultural situation in northern Poland during the Roman period admit today that the roots of the Wielbark culture commonly identified with the early Goths are to be sought in local traditions. The results of that process, which can be explained in terms of change in symbolic consciousness rather than by a demographic expansion, became archaeologically visible in the mid-first century AD. The decision to leave the Baltic zone could have been taken by a Gothic social elite endangered by tensions resulting from unstable trade relations with the Roman Empire and climatic deterioration. However, a substantial part of the agricultural Wielbark population stayed behind, preferring well-known circumstances than risks of an unpredictable fate in distant lands. Among those people, after some time, the hierarchization process was repeated, leading to the emergence of a new elite, which decided to follow their predecessors by migrating to the south east. They are identified by the sources as the Gepids. There are strong archaeological indications that some part of the Wielbark population must have again stayed behind in Poland maintaining close contacts with their southern ‘cousins’. Archaeologists today suggest that some ‘Gothic’ groups from the Pontic steppes returned to the Baltic. The merging of Germanic and Baltic traditions resulted in a new cultural formation. In the ninth century AD, its material culture became more and more Prussian but there is evidence for lively contacts with western Europe, Scandinavia and the Abbassid Khalifate. A specific tradition recorded in the oldest Polish chronicles and in the twelfth century epitaph of the first Polish king Boleslav the Brave raises the serious possibility that some memory of the presence of Goths east of the Vistula somehow survived over centuries and it was used for construction of the Piasts' dynastic tradition.