Helgoland’s history is far more than a thousand years old. Strictly speaking, it began many millions of years ago, when a salt pillow pushed a piece of the overlying red, gray and white surface layers upwards: with a mound of red sandstone, shell limestone and chalk.
However, we cannot take you that far back, namely to the geological age of the Tertiary, but we can take you to a period of about a thousand years.
We invite you to a themed walk where you will encounter Helgoland’s history.
You will learn, for example, that in 1200 BC the royal island of Atlantis is said to have sunk into the sea within sight of Helgoland, and that the notorious pirate Klaus Störtebeker was defeated and captured off the island,
Heligoland, as a British crown colony, was a smuggling center during the Napoleonic Continental Blockade, and Prussians and Austrians fought a naval battle with the Danes within sight of the island.
naval battle within sight of the island.
It is no longer possible to determine exactly when the first settlement of the only German offshore island took place.
It was first mentioned in documents around 700 AD, when Saint Willibrord, Bishop of Utrecht, reported on the “land of the Frisian deity Fosite” and the vain attempt to Christianize the inhabitants.
It was not until 100 years later that the islanders also found their way to the Christian faith. It was Bishop Liudger from Münster who had all of Fosite’s shrines on the island destroyed and ordained the Helgoland chieftain’s son Landricus as a priest.
The island only came to the attention of a wider public when Klaus Störtebeker and his Likedeeler were captured by the Hamburgers in 1401 in the waters off the island.
were decisively defeated by the Hamburgers in a sea battle in the waters off the island.
From then on, Helgoland remained a well-behaved fishing island, with only the ruling relationships changing.
Sometimes the island was German, then the Danish king ruled, and finally in 1807 Helgoland became a British crown colony and experienced an economic heyday as an important smuggling center.